Why is Dangerous Intersection such a slow-loading website?

[UPDATE: If you can see this update, you are now on DI’s new faster server, and the rest of this post is moot.]

I’m painfully aware of the problem, which is being caused by problems with our current hosting, an upgrade to a new design and growing traffic, which now brings us about 6,000 visitors every day.

I’m writing to let readers know that in a few days,  we will be transferring this website to a new host, and this will provide much faster page-loading.

This problem with our site loading slowly (and repeatedly crashing over the past 6 weeks) raised an interesting question:  How important is it to user that a site loads quickly?  Extremely important.  Consider these statistics:

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks. Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% . . .

I hope that within the next few days, we’ll all see dramatically increased speed on this website.  In the meantime, thank you for your patience.