Advice needed from a web expert!

I have a personal web site, my first attempt, which is up and running although still under development. I know am with one of the best hosting companies, StartLogic, all the necessary tools are provided, and their support is excellent and rapid. However, they are based in the USA and I live in France, where my broadband speed is usually between 2 and 8 mB, the lower figure being when the USA starts its working day.

Because of apparent web congestion working on my site, and for other people, connecting to it is subject to long delays, sometimes timing out. I have two questions that I hope a more experienced user can answer.
1. Would it be advisable to move to a UK or France based host company?
2. Can anyone recommend such a company for me to check out?

My site is still small, and will only be used for photographs and friends contacts. You can visit it HERE if you are bored enough.

Roger

 

Its 5:15a.m. in Texas and I am at your site now. I have been there for four minutes and it is still loading galleries. I am running at 7mb/s. Flash and lots of graphics take up a lot of bandwidth. Bells and whistles are not always the best thing especially for those who have slower connections.

I don't think distance is the problem. I did a speed test to Christchurch New Zealand and got 5mb/s.

I waited for eight minutes and finally clicked on "me and my site" and it loaded fine. Not sure what you want viewers to see when the page loads, but it it is "me and my site ", maybe that should be the default.

Mitch

forgot to mention, I am not an expert. I haven't done web development in nearly ten years.

 

Thanks Mitch,

You were quite right - I hadn't established the home page correctly. It works a lot better now. Now to sort out the gallery loading!

Roger

 

You're welcome. It does take a while for the galleries to load. I don't know if it matters, but are they stored on that server or somewhere else.

One thing I noticed, on menu selection "Sand, Shores, and the Beach" I get a script error:

A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?​

Mitch

 

That's odd Mitch, I don't get that message at all, the site is working OK for me on IE and FF. I think that when I can get Filezilla to co-operate I shall mount a duplicate web site on my machine using WAMP so that I can experiment in safety, but at the moment it is refusing to connect to 127.0.0.1.

Roger

 

Roger,

This is going to get beyond my outdated expertise so hopefully someone will jump in here to help, but if I understand this correctly you may want to check your ServerName. If it is localhost then anyone trying to connect will be redirected to their own computer.

You may also want to check your TCPListener binding if that applies.

OR, I could be completely wrong and I would have sent you on a wild goose chase - and you know, they're hard to catch.

Mitch

 

Relief! Relief!
I ******* up! I have WAMP on my machine as server and I hadn't realised that it was not starting up with Vista. I have now put the Wamp server icon in the tool tray for starting and stopping it, and everything is back to normal, and I can work on my duplicate site.

Roger

 

Glad you got is figured out. Now have fun

Mitch