Heike if you have done testing to other servers and the results / speeds are OK you have pretty much eliminated your computer and your ISP as the 'source' of the problem.
Troubleshooting your connectivity is a bit like tracing an electrical short, you want to go through a logical process of elimination until you find the short.
In network connectivity there are a few 'layers' of transport each needs to be functioning correctly or the results are unpredictable - not unlike electricity. In terms of your internet connection we can look at a few things, which likely your ISP has already taken you through - which is why they indicated 'it wasn't a problem on their end'.
Odds are the problem is somewhere between where your ISP's network responsibility ends and the server the forums are on - the worst place for this issue because until the problem affects lot's of people it won't be taken too seriously by those in between which we have no one to contact - sorry
We can mostly eliminate your modem, however it is sometimes good to 'reboot' it, simply power it off and on (or unplug it and plug it back in if there is no power switch).
If you have a hardware router or firewall it would be a good idea to also 'reboot' it after the modem has Finnished rebooting, same way power it off then back on.
After your router / firewall is rebooted, restart your computer - not a good idea to just power it off though. Follow the steps you normally use for your PC to shut it down and power it back up.
The above 3 steps give you a 'clean' system from home. If nothing else you may free up some memory that may have been in use for no good reason (lot's of applications are like this - poor programing).
Now that you have a good clean system to work with try the forums again, if you still have a problem, try a few other overseas web sites - this isn't always easy to do, because even though the site may be for a company overseas it could be hosted down the street from you.
www.telus.com is in Canada - I know this as I work for them, another to try is
www.cbc.ca which is in Canada.
If telus.com and cbc.com load fine and mikenchell.com does not we need to find out where the 'bottleneck' is.
We can try some old school networking tools to test for a bottleneck, however even these can be misleading as many servers these days 'stealth' themselves to prevent hacking.
Having tested a bit on my PC, I know the server the forums are on is in fact hiding 'somewhat'.
You can 'traceroute' the path your PC is taking to get to
www.mikenchell.com this will 'hop' from server to server and report back how long it took at each hop.
We need your command prompt to do this.
If you run Linux you'll want to open a terminal and type "traceroute
www.mikenchell.com" and press enter.
On windows, click start -> run and in the box that comes up type "cmd" and press enter - this will bring your command prompt up. In the command prompt type "tracert
www.mikenchell.com" and press enter.
This is what it will look like, although you will take a different 'route' therefore the ip addresses or servers responding will be a bit different.
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burke@demon:~$ traceroute www.mikenchell.com
traceroute to www.mikenchell.com (66.147.229.251), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 0.698 ms 0.385 ms 0.358 ms
2 d66-222-192-1.abhsia.telus.net (66.222.192.1) 25.998 ms 23.339 ms 22.562 ms
3 154.11.212.130 (154.11.212.130) 21.949 ms 21.553 ms 21.904 ms
4 chcgildtgr00.bb.telus.com (154.11.11.34) 54.066 ms 54.597 ms 53.878 ms
5 peer-02-ge-3-0-2-41.chcg.twtelecom.net (66.192.252.101) 65.415 ms 55.889 ms 56.462 ms
6 66-126-65-30.static.twtelecom.net (66.162.65.30) 77.278 ms 73.962 ms 72.955 ms
7 66-126-65-30.static.twtelecom.net (66.162.65.30) 73.984 ms 73.322 ms 72.960 ms
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 *
The stars * above may be indicating a problem, but likely it is simply the result of 'stealth' behaviour on the server
www.mikenchell.com.
What we are really interested in is the numbers beside the servers' ip 73.984 ms 73.322 ms etc. this is the response time of the servers - lower is better.
Another simple old school test is "ping" it works kind of like the game of ping pong, you "ping" and the server "pongs" a response back. The command is the same on pretty much any computer "ping
www.mikenchell.com" Unfortunately the server the forum is on won't play with us - it's 'stealthing' itself.
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burke@demon:~$ ping www.mikenchell.com
PING www.mikenchell.com (66.147.229.251) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- www.mikenchell.com ping statistics ---
14 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 13063ms
This should give you a good start, let us know how you make out.
Burke