I have a site with a lot of flash movies. I get a lot of visitors, especially during Fridays. At that point, I still got lots of free CPU and memory usage on my server, but it's really slow. So I'm thinking that it is all the loading of flash files that slows it down, it could take up to 5 seconds to load a page during my busy hours on Fridays. Do you think it's the loading of flash files that makes it this slow? I've thought about getting an unmetered server and just use it to host files on, what do you think about this? What kind of hosting do you recommend for this? I already have my own server, should I get a new unmetered one, or are there any companies offering services that would be cheaper for me? Thanks in advance!
First you might want to get your sys admin to look at the server, it might just need a simple fix such as a faster link to the internet e.g. 100Mbps instead of 10Mbps or adding more disks. Spreading the load over more servers should help, or you could look at using one of the CDN (Content Distribution Networks) for your static files. This would not only take the load off the server but also move the files closer to your users. Your host may offer a CDN as an additional service, if not Google is your best bet. One that I can remember is www.simplecdn.com but I've not used them.
If you are streaming then you might have an issue that is exhausting available connections. If it is apache, then have someone look at it. You might benefit from tweaking the configs.