people can't visit my site

Hello,

I'm not sure if this is the right section for this post, but I figured the problem probably has something to do with hardware or software.

I've never encountered problems visiting my site before from a number of computers, but some of my friends and relatives say they can't get to the site. One says that when she clicks on a thumb on the left side, nothing happens (she says it times out) whereas others say simply that nothing loads into their web browser.

I told them that it might take a while for all the graphics to download but no more than a minute, yet they all seem to say that they can leave it for several minutes and it just times out.

Mind you, most of these people probably have out-dated computers, OS's, and browsers. Could it just be that they need to upgrade?

Please have a look at the site yourself and tell me if you encounter similar issues: http://www.surrealsource.com.

Your site is extremely slow to load. I don't believe this is an issue of filesize, but that you are using a slow server. Do you know where the server is located? For example, if you have a website in the US and you are visiting from China, load times will be a lot slower than any other visitor from within the US. If your relatives/friends are from far away, this might be part of the problem.

For me (California, USA) it takes 10seconds+ to load a page. And that's before anything starts to show up. That never happens for me on pages with strong servers.

The delay appears to be request time (my computer asks your server for a page and your server begins to send it back), not the time it actually takes to transfer the data, but this would need a lot more testing.

I would recommend that you look at getting a new host if this is a problem.

Alternatively cut back on filesize as much as possible: compress the images more, use smaller images, and try to clean up your source code. But realistically your page isn't so graphics-heavy that this would be a serious issue-- the server is the problem.


Of course this is based only on the current status of the page: it may be that this varies and perhaps you are viewing the page at a time the server is performing better. I'm not sure why you'd be viewing the page any faster than others, unless you are hosting this locally and thus you aren't connecting as far as they are to view it.


Also, in response to wondering about their older systems, no, that should not, in general, be a problem. It's hard to say if they will view it as fast as on a new computer, but one simple test can prove whether your site is the problem: can they view other pages "quickly" and then find your site to be "slow"? If everything loads slowly, I doubt they'd even notice your site as "slow".
If they are on a slow internet connection (dialup, etc) this might be relevant, but the same logic applies: if your site is RELATIVELY slow, then there's something wrong with your site, not their computer.
(The exception is if your site is in some way "special", but it's not-- you just have graphics and text. If you had some sort of very graphics-heavy layout or lots of applets/plugins, that might be different, but your site isn't beyond the normal range for complexity.)

Thanks djr,

It is a known fact that my server is a piece of crap. I own it and run it out of my office. It ain't the most powerful beast on the internet.

Other than that, I came across the suggestion on another forum to use this instead of the image gallery I'm currently using. The guy who suggested this didn't say it was the size of the graphics files but the fact that there are too many of them for an image gallery in particular and that the amount of javascript required to maintain it might tend to clog of some client computers.

I would say that your site is pretty graphics intensive for a main page. I had 4.5 MB for the size of the main page, which is almost entirely due to the graphics. The load time of the site for me was not too bad, but it still took a while. I suspect it is due to the time of day that I tried to access your site.

It just seems to me that that is too large for a main page considering the nature of your site. I would recommend a link to a gallery of some sort and only a few sample images as opposed to all of them on the main page.

The links on the right could be a little lighter. They are somewhat hard to read against the dark background.

I think that the dagger thrower in the "magic show" image should practice more with dummies first though :p

If you are running this out of your office, then that explains everything: it will load quickly when you're near it and the farther you get, the slower it'll load. Since anything on a personal connection (basically anything short of a professional hosting company's connection) will load slowly, this is going to severely limit what you can do with your page. It'll also only get worse with more people visiting the page at the same time: if two people are viewing those images at once, it'll take twice as long to load.

One other possibility is that the server's hardware is severely deficient, but if only one person is viewing the page and it's still this slow, then it's almost guaranteed to be a connection issue and not hardware: that's additionally true if you find it's faster when you're closer to the server.


Limit the graphics a lot (I didn't realize it was that big... you should rarely have a page over 500kb or maybe 1mb with all of the graphics, unless it's a full-size photo gallery or downloads page).

Alternatively, just get a good server. I don't know what your financial situation is, but even for FREE you can get a better (faster) server than what you have. The price will increase with what you need to do with it, but for a personal site with just images and text, I think you could find a sufficient free host.

You could always keep your current server for development and testing (and I'd recommend it). If the free host ever becomes a problem, just switch it back and no harm done.


For $5/month you can get a really good hosting account, assuming you don't need a huge amount of space, don't require lots of features (like databases, etc), and don't have a huge number of visitors. Again, for your type of site, this should be perfectly fine.