It's probably down to all the media references in the db moreso than the pages themselves making the db so big, its not excessively large.

You should probably update your joomla installations to the latest version too, there's a lot of J!1.5 hacking going on, you really need to be on 1.5.26 or whatever the latest is to fix some of the security holes.

I'd say migrate to 2.5/3 but its a real PITA to do.

1. you're running 6 different engines/instances out of one 'cheap and cheerful' hosting package. that can't be helping can it?

I know I'm pushing what is reasonable to expect on shared hosting, but it doesn't mean I should just sit back and go "meh, it's shared hosting". I'm just trying to make sure that everything is running as well as I can get it, with what is available to me

How is microphoto behaving now to you guys? I've pretty much either updated or uninstalled any of the websites that were out of date, the remaining ones are all cached as per hostgators documentation.

There's still a brief pause from clicking a link to something happening, but it does seem to be loading a lot snappier to me now?

Might preload the cache I guess.

Perhaps, but what I'm getting at more is that no shared hosting should really be that slow that you can't run a handful of small, low traffic sites with good response times, his biggest site is effectively just a photo gallery so shouldn't be slow. I don't think it's a very good host otherwise.

I upgraded the hosting package for tekforums because we seemed to be hitting a wall from the volume of db requests, the server hasn't dropped for any significant amount of time since. But I'm also running an eCommerce site and a bunch of other fairly low traffic sites on the hosting package, so I expected to have to upgrade at some point to keep things slick for everyone.