Question : Who is a reliable lowcost provider of dedicated servers

Hi. We have a dedicated server currently with 1and1 which is a cost of less than £100 pm. however the speed when we use this for conection to our database is very slow. to open ONE record in our database takes 33 seconds.
We have also tested heart Internet however there server cost is 3 x as much as we currently pay. there load speed of a record is about 18 seconds.

We have pinged each server and with 1and1 we are getting 52m/s and heart we are getting 38m/s I think this is due to the server with 1and1 is located in Germany and we are in MAnchester UK and the Heart server is far nearer to us. Both claim the same network speed of 10mbp/s

Does any one know how I can improve speed or if they know of a dedicated server provider based in the UK that is competitive with 1and1 and offer the same if not better service?

Answer : Who is a reliable lowcost provider of dedicated servers

There are so many factors.  I actually doubt that the server specs are the problem.  One way to isolate that is to run some of your heavier views using SSMS.  If they are fast that way, then the server is doing fine.  It's more likely the latency, throughput and method of linking that's the problem.

The most likely problem is your (seemingly) exclusive use of linked tables.  They have their place, but they are the slowest way to use SQL Server data.  Other options are passthrough queries, binding to ADO recordsets, etc.

Please see my PowerPoint presentation on techniques for using Access as a client-server front-end to SQL Server databases.  It's called "Best of Both Worlds" at our free J Street Downloads page: http://ow.ly/M2WI.  It includes some thoughts on when to use SQL Server, performance and security considerations, concurrency approaches, and techniques to help everything run smoothly.

Cheers,
Armen