We are no longer based in the UK, and the server has been hosted in the US for... oh about a decade.
No maintenance issues that I'm aware of, certainly not consistent ones. And although we switched servers less than a year ago, it was an upgrade, and not to a different host. We've been on the same host in the same datacenter for several years now. So nothing on that side that could explain the issues you're seeing.
I just downloaded an 845MB file from the server at an average of 14MB (that's *bytes" not *bits*) per second. It took about a minute to download nearly a gig.
I'm on symmetric gigabit here in the Bay Area, California, US. So the bandwidth to the server itself probably isn't an issue. However the route to your ISP may not be great Martin. I can't test that easily, but you could. Do a ping test to start, and maybe a tracert, to our server. See what comes up. For me it's about like this:
Ping average: around 60ms
For comparison Google is 3ms,
Adobe.com is a surprising ~150ms (after repeated tests).
Tracert shows 20 hops, which is kind of a lot considering I'm in the US already. To be fair 8 of those are within my ISP though and are very low latency, and hops to Google are 16, so not much better (and yet 3ms ping time, so all is well there). Curious what you'll come up with.
The other thing is anecdotally I have noticed more PNGs, large JPGs, etc. over the past year or two. So it's possible that your expectation of "it's only a 1920x1080 image, it should load faster" is sometimes not aligning with reality just because someone chose to save a 3MB image at that resolution, which is entirely unnecessary in 99% of cases.
- Oshyan