Speed Issues - Ads Removed

Sorry guys for the ridiculously slow speed of the site recently. The speed issue I think is 99% down to the ads, the income from which covers monthly running costs. The problem is coming from the servers that the ads are pulled from being slow i.e. Amazon and Google rather than the server on which cancuncare is hosted, so I cant do much about servers I have no control over.

Also it probably has something to do with the cascade of ads. Amazon pays the best so first the site looks for a suitable Amazon ad to show the user, if it doesn't have one then instead of showing whitespace it finds an Ad from Google, and if it doesn't have one from Google it shows a TTR or Desire ad. This all slows the site down it seems.

What I tried to do a few weeks ago is make some speed tweaks elsewhere in the hope that increases there might make the site less slow overall in spite of still serving ads. That worked for a while but it seems things are as slow as molasses again and other undesirable issues were introduced as a consequence.

I'm going to turn off almost all of the ads for logged in members but still show them to guests. I'll see what difference it makes in terms of income. It could be that a faster site results in more return visits, more posts and threads etc, and with 2/3 of all views being from guests it might actually turn out not to be too bad a hit if activity increases, plus a better user experience for members.

I'm going to leave it like this for at least a week and see how things go.