Cloud Vs. Dedicated Server - Web hosting advice?

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

I currently have about 5 websites, all of which are now running Wordpress to save time managing the content. The problem is my main site is awfully slow which I feel will impact my SEO and visitor interaction. I am using quite a few plugins however most of which I consider essentials, for instance backup, caching & anti spam and so on. I feel that my current web hosting plan is not up to scratch and I would like to consider my options for an upgrade. Any advice speeding up my sites? (please no affiliate links)

This is the main site which is really slow.
www.owenprescott.com

My current web hosting plan:
Company: Justhost
Server: Shared
Cost: £6.99 per month
Domains: 1 Parked & 4 Addon (.com's & .co.uk's)
Bandwidth: Unlimited

My last renewal was £100.66 inc VAT which seems like a lot.

[AliceWonder]

I prefer dedicated, I use linode - they've always done right by me.
I use a CentOS 64-bit image.

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

I prefer dedicated, I use linode - they've always done right by me.
I use a CentOS 64-bit image.

Do these price plans look fair? I am sure prices I was looking at before were cheaper but after finding some info on my hosts packages it seems these are the prices available unless I switch host. I am curious how much of a speed increase I could potentially get with these plans. Also does speed decrease the more addon domains that are hosted? In contrast to the VPS standard package, I could host 2 shared packages and perhaps see better speeds than if were to use the VPS standard?

VPS Hosting
Features   Standard   Enhanced   Premium   Ultimate
Monthly Price   £19.74   £39.48   £59.22   £78.96
3 Month Term   £19.08   £37.50   £55.93   £78.96
6 Month Term   £17.76   £35.53   £52.64   £78.96
12 Month Term   £16.45   £32.90   £49.35   £78.96

Dedicated Hosting
Monthly Price   £98.71   £131.61   £164.51
3 Month Term   £95.42   £125.03   £157.93
6 Month Term   £88.84   £118.45   £148.06
12 Month Term   £82.25   £111.87   £138.19

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

I don't think your problem is actually the web hosting. I looked at your site, and your sending a lot of images, maybe you want to invest in a CDN. Also you may want memcache if that isn't installed that would help. You can probably stay on the same hardware and just make some software tweaks and be blazing fast, cause your site is actually fast, the images are slow.

I was under the impression they were highly optimized, I save for web in Photoshop at around 80% then they are further optimized with a plugin. Any recommendations on a image around 900x500px? Also I will check out memcache, thanks.

[Lethos]

It all depends on what your budget affords you.
Shared hosting is fine if your biggest complaint is sometimes it's slow. If it's crashing then yeah that is a problem.

But why is it slow?

Is it the server fault?
or
Have you asked it to load too many things and the requests pile up.

In this case, most of the reason why the site is slow, is because the site is being asked to load a lot of large graphics, custom fonts and multiple separate CSS files. Tracking the slow ones is easy with browser plugins, so you can see which ones are slowing done your load times.

A VPS or dedicated server certainly improve response and request times to 100's of ms, rather than measured in seconds, but it won't help that much if it's still requesting more information per page load than it really needs to, especially if it's slow because of being reliant on a 3rd party server or is client dependant (Flash/JS).

So first I'd recommend making some changes to speed it up without changing the server:

Question if you really need that custom font (ie. remove it)
Use a WP based CSS min tool to combine the multiple CSS files on the blog as one CSS file.

Try to Replace those like/share plugins with static versions, rather than dynamic ones.
Try reduce the number of plugins used in general, that grab content from their own site to work.

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

Thanks for all the advice, I never considered the fact that plugins pointing to other sites could be an issue. I am changing the old image optimizer and I will be trying out smushit which will hopefully improve the file size. I did try out some speed tests knocking the speed down from 15 seconds a few days ago, I guess there is still plenty of room for optimization so an upgrade might not be needed.