Glad I'm not using Flickr as my host It should be showing now Moonie, must be something to do with their new layout.

Another alternative is to use a cloud service like Amazon S3 - that would probably give the fastest loading no matter where the end-user is, as they serve from the servers in the same country as the end-user. It should also be cheaper as you only pay for bandwidth used.

I am considering it for the sites album pictures, as not only will it be faster but mean I won't have to worry about back-ups as I think it's part of their service.

When I go to page 2 - the second picture loads straight away but the first picture takes about 10 seconds.

The second picture loads small straight away whilst the first comes in large then shrinks once loaded.

Hiope that makes sense.

I was reading about cloud hosting earlier Azz, think I'll stick with shared hosting for the time being.

Phil, Azz, Moonie here are two identical images, one is from my Godaddy account and the other with my new host, Hostgator.

I've pinged and tracert both several times but get varying results each time. Incidentally I pinged yophotographer and at first had the shortest ping but other pings were not so good. So certainly not a reliable method for testing speeds.

1)Godaddy


2)Hostgator


First preview showed Hostgator image load first, for me.

The second one loaded slightly faster but I would upload a 10MB file and use those to compare tbh Grant.

Also, if it were me, I would switch anyway - as godaddy has shown it has been slow (at times) - then try out the new host for a while. If it's crap try another. Unfortunately shared hosting is a bit of a lottery... even if you get a good company, you might be unlucky and be on a crap server! Sods low

Yes I was thinking about switching a while ago anyway Azz, as my wordpress sites are slow even with the cache plugin etc and it is also well documented that Gd is a no no for wp. So, at least I know there will be an improvement with those sites.

I was hoping to use larger images for this test but I'm still transferring/copying my websites over and the sparrow pic was the largest file available. Still got 20% left to copy over and that is out of 3GB which I stopped last night and continued today.

I backed up and exported my databases and created new ones on the new host and so, just a few edits on the files and everything should go smoothly, hopefully

I just look at the pictures!

Glad you do Dawn

Everything is transfered over now and went very smoothly, even changing the name servers was instant.

I certainly have noticed a difference with my wordpress sites loading much quicker but found dejavuphoto on godaddy always quick anyway.

I downloaded an 8mb file via ftp from my new website space and also from godaddy which I still have active. I was suprised to find the file from godaddy server took over a minute and hostgator about 20 seconds

So far so good looks like I'll be stying with them.

Phil, if you have a moment could you check some of my image posts to see if you notice a difference in them loading for you now, thanks.