under 2 seconds for me

Thanks guys, that's what I was expecting. Must just be that by some freak chance my boss and I are connected slowly to that one server on the whole of the internet. It's damn confusing but since it's working fine for everyone else (worst first visit hit so far has been 7 seconds) then my boss and I will probably have to tough it out. We'd like to keep with our current hosting provider so the only other option for speed is to go from a shared server to a VPS which would cost a whole lot more than the website will be worth for some time.

Anyone interested in the speed tweeks made here they are:

• Heavy cacheing
• Timer based scheduled tasks
• Server and Private authenticated cacheing
• XepientSolutions Keep Alive module set to load all of the pages in the site map to keep them freshly cached in the memory of the server. I found that on the shared environment the memory cache was being flushed far too regularly.

Cheers!