Improving First Byte Time

[pmeenan]

I hesitate to always point to the host/server as being slow because it is a combination of the server code (your application) and the actual physical servers (web and database). Shared hosting providers generally have much lower server performance (particularly around database queries which publishing systems like to do a lot of) than VPS or dedicated servers.

You can usually solve it in one of two ways:
1 - Throw more hardware at it (get a better performing host/server)
2 - Improve the application code

Even slow shared hosting providers can be made to perform well but it usually takes a fair amount of development work and tuning to get there.

You can try the W3 Total Cache plugin since you appear to be running on wordpress. It will let you turn on various different caching layers to help hide the underlying performance issues. You can also try turning off all of your plugins to see if it is being caused by a plugin (and then turn them on until you track down the culprit).