From California, of late, the response time for board reads and posts is 10-20 seconds for each action. Posts are slower. As if the server is bogged down.

Is it that slow on the other side of the pond?

(My speedtest.net and other web sites are normal/good).

In my job, I chose an apparently big/good hosting company in town. Paid for a Windows VM from them. Worked great for a long time. One day, poof. Long story short, their RAID failed and they could not restore. They were pretty uncaring to say the least. Tried to up-sell me on their $$$ better Backup service.

Fortunately, I had done a drive image of the VM then downloaded that 30GB to my own storage. That helped. But they could not take my drive image and restore. They didn't know how (!). Wouldn't let me into the data center "for security reasons, even with an escort." The  Image was made by Windows backup. My own backup at least got me all my important data.

They seem to pay attention only to huge enterprise customers.

There's a lot of flakes in that biz.