jje007 - 10:36 am on Mar 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thank you Lammert, for your warm welcome & your help!

Contacts provider
Based on your suggestions, I just got in touch with my provider.
There are indeed 2 servers used for our website: a hosting server & a db server. He is telling me that the shared server might be a very little slower because of security redirects. I suppose this is normal, isn't it?
He asked me to do a trace route, in order to check the connection between my PC & provider (via internet). I answered him, that we get a lot of complaints from users about the slow website, from all over Europe. So the issue is not related to my desk PC specifically. He answered me that it could be related to a Europe-network-problem for Internet, which is a bit hard to believe for me.
Still, I will do a trace route, and ask my partner (located about 50 km away) to do the same.

And to answer your first question:
yes, we use shared hosting. I contacted the provider several times, and he said that dedicated hosting would diminish our problem. But I am not sure, as our problem could also be due to bad programming, as you mention.
On the other hand, we are told by our provider that we dispose of unlimited bandwith. I actually am not sure of this.

On your first point:
what do you mean by 'delays when loading images from the server'? Should I download just an image? So the URL would be www.sitename/images/imagename.png?

On your second point:
In fact, every page uses mySql-call (mySQL is already used for fetching the content of the page). So I am not sure that I dispose of a php-script without sql.

On your third point:
Every PHPpage is using MySQL. And every PHPpage goes slow. We also saw that when we are using our Admin-tool (which does a lot of MySQL-activities), the site is even slower. So the connection to the MySQL-server, or the MySQL-server itself could indeed be the bottleneck!
I wonder how I can be sure of this specifically.

Remaining question:
Does there exist a tool that I can use for measuring the different times, in order to find the time-consuming bottleneck?
With this, I could prove something towards programmers/providers.

I guess you receive more questions than answers from me (-; I can tell you that we are very busy with this as this issue is a big worry for us!