It is true, loading on Squarespace is like advancing on a Labour Stronghold armed with Cameron's political proposals as weapons; alternatively walking in treacle!

Merry Christmas to all (not too late I hope).

David, have you tried yelling at the squarespace people? That usually works with slow vendors. Or you could post their site and we'll all go over there a gripe at them a bit!

Go and go now!

You need a tech guru to advise, I think. It does seem like everytime a web site reaches a certain level of site views the site has to redo its platform. Maybe ask a fellow blogger who has reached critical mass and has gone through it before.

I tried a post on typepad, and while it wasnt as slooooooow as Squarespace, it wasnt spritely either

I don't like the other one.

David

Have you thought about going the self-hosted route? You can get tons of space and bandwidth for very little these days. (E.g. Siteground offer 500GB space and 5TB bandwidth for $6/month. Build the site in five minutes flat with Wordpress and you're back getting stuck into the lefties before you know it.

The only drawback is that you'd have to get the mugs reprinted with the new url ;-)

Here's a suggestion:

Blogspot - FREE

Haloscan - FREE

Both are fast too. You cannot lose.

LOL @ Anthony and Squarespace generally.

Posting on this site from my side of the pond is horrendous, not to mention being shut out for over a month due to a clitch. Demand they fix your problems or give you your money back!

Posting from this side of the border is horrendous too. I would be quicker walking up and handing David Vance a note.

I think I'll go off and read War and Peace now. This post should be up by the time I return.

I agree with Fiona, I didn't like the other site either, particularly the comments going from the bottom up.

The only drawback is that you'd have to get the mugs reprinted with the new url ;-)

Drawback ? The mugs will be collectors items, worth a fortune on e bay, especially ebay.ie !

The problems seemed to start around the time that DV upgraded the SqSp account. Perhaps you could downgrade back to the bandwidth you were on previously, to test if the issue goes away.
I also notice that the url of this page is
http://atangledweb.squarespace.com/httpatangledwebsquarespace/etc
Perhaps it makes no odds, but perhaps the extra folder's name is messing up the system or something?

FWiW, here in the Czech Republic the Squarespace site loads faster than the old one, and commenting is not too bad either. Certainly it seems better than average to me in my experience.

From this end, Squarespace is by far the worst service I have encountered.

As a commentator, I've had far better experiences with Typepad, as a host/commentator, I've had a pretty good run with over two years.

Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise (http://majikthise.typepad.com/) owns a Typepad-run site that gets a lot of traffic. I'll show her this page and ask her to comment.

as a host/commentator, I've had a pretty good run with --Blogger--over two years.

Thanks Phantom,

I have started to parallel post over on the AWT typepad blog as I consider change.I am working on redesigning it to look just like Squarespace.

David

Havent posted much as been busy but Squarespace is veeeery slow today and when im at work its the same using their v fast server! I think it has its plusses - but it does get a bit stuck too often.

FWIW I think the old typepad space is just fine. I dont recall the issues that caused your move to squarepsace though now.

TypePad has been glacially slow for comments for the last several months. They're trying to weed out spam, but mostly they're forcing everyone who comments more than once from the same IP address to perform multiple CAPTCHA checks. A lot of people just give up and scrap their comments instead of typing in five different strings of nonsense syllables to convince TypePad they're not robots. Of course, I'm still getting tons o spam commments.

Oh wow.

I have had problems with Typepad thinking I was a spammer, but that's been fixed, and its been better.

Maybe I've thought Typepad to be good because, while glacial, I've been better than the much slower squarespace service.

Maybe none of these outfits are good enough?

Honestly, I've not had any problem for ages and ages with blogger sites including United Irelander and Balrog.

So you all had the same issues with TypePad as you had here?

..

This is the only site we're seeing this sort of reaction on -- and we host many, many thousands off of clustered systems. I'm wondering if it's due to the UK / US divide.

I'd be more than happy to paste you all the server logs showing Squarespace serving these pages in under a second in generality (99% case).

I'm pretty convinced it was the embeds. Also note that you have a very large HTML page (200k+), and a 77kb banner. Each click you're sending 1/4th a meg to your visitors. From slow connections, that is noticable.

David, please note that most of your users are noting that the site is indeed performing appropriately. One or two users from work connections -- that may be interrupted by proxies and other connection issues -- is in no way indicative of a connection problem with our system.

To the customer indicating blogger as speedy: You're kidding, right? Blogger goes completely down (on record) for occasionally a full day out of each month. There are many reliable hosts out there (like Squarespace), but Blogger is not considered one of them.

I'll even do this: Instead of reacting to these random comments where no information is provided, if any of you have a consistent issue connecting to Squarespace in any way -- give David your email and I'll personally diagnose your situation. I'm not sure what else you could ask for, and I'd challenge another vendor to attempt to dive into this in this fashion.