Flash Heavy Design Web Hosting

[akcampbell]

I'm working on my first development and have just transferred my site to Godaddy. I have used alot of Flash and it takes Godaddy maybe 20 seconds to serve some pages. I've got various ideas on how to speed things up and wondered if anybody could tell me what would have the most beneficial effect on Flash serving speeds.

1) Move my site hosting to a fast UK host. Most of site visitors will initially be from the UK. I did a benchmarking search on Google and found some fast UK hosts but not sure how much difference this would make.

2) Get a dedicated server acccount at Godaddy. This would increase my monthly hosting costs tenfold so I don't think this is an option.

3) Break the Flash files up so I have one web page per frame where possible, use some sort of pre-loading feature so that the first page of Flash appears after the initial frame loads, remove text animation, reduce file size of embedded images and so on.

I'm a development newbie so any other ideas and advice would be very welcome.

 

[CrazyTech]

How large are these flash files? It would seem to me that the limiting factor would most likely be download size, although a slow server certainly would not help.

Geographic location can make a difference. If you're targeting UK users, then it would make sense to have your hosting close by. However, American-based hosting generally works pretty well for Europeans because of the quality of the connections we have across the Atlantic.

Without seeing the website, I can't really tell you that Godaddy might be a source of the problem. However, look at what Godaddy offers in the way of hosting and realize how many folks are put on a single server to make a profit. This is a general handicap for sites that might be a little more demanding in server resources.

 

[akcampbell]

I've worked out how to do this now. There is an Image Optimisation function in Alligator Flash Designer and it cut my Flash file size down from 0.5MB to 0.1MB which is fine. Thanks for you help, rep added.

 

[~ServerPoint~]

I think that all that you need is upgrade your current web hosting package. VPS or dedicated server must suit you