And that is where the 15 to 20 seconds came from. Since almost everyone now runs at 28.8 or higher, page sizes of 20 to 40K are not unreasonable at all. In fact, this is a good size range and another rule of thumb for you. I d also think twice before putting up a big, fancy slow-loading Flash page. This really depends on the connection your web host has with the Internet.
Many companies have more than one connection to the Internet, which is called multi-homing.
This allows people to still be able to access your site even if one connection fails. Speed from the host also depends on how many web sites they put on each of their servers. If you happen to be on a server with only 100 web sites on it, versus one with 200 web sites running, your site is going to run more quickly with the first server. You can guess quite easily what kind of sites are going to be high-traffic, and which ones would not be receiving so many hits. It s not that complicated, really.