Safari will not load my website. Driving me totally insane.

Question

Okay. This problem is pretty much UNSOLVABLE and if anybody can help me get to the bottom of this, I will be their best friend for eternity. Every single support person I have asked has had no idea how to fix this.
THE PROBLEM:
My portfolio website loads *extremely* slowly in Safari. Only Safari. Safari on every single computer, iPhone, iPad, and iPod I have tried.
Strangely enough, the problem seems to be contained SOLELY to my host's server. When I upload my site files to a server hosted by a different company, Safari loads the site fine.
Here are some images to show you what I'm dealing with.
The site loading in Safari on my current server: http://maxigumee.com/HOSTONY_IMAGE.jpg
The site loading in Safari on a *different* server (it's totally fine): http://maxigumee.com/godaddy_image.jpg
Here is my *actual* website file: http://maxwelltielman.com
Just to clarify— I have already gone through the steps of validating the HTML and stripped the site completely of CSS and extraneous code so that only the images were displayed. The problem still persisted.
The problem occurs whenever I visit my site for the first time on a computer, reload the website, or empty the cache.
I've e-mailed my host numerous times about this and they have been nothing but useless on the matter. They have informed me that the site loads fine in Firefox (not helpful) and that their server is fine.
What should I doooo? I'm on the verge of ripping my hair out in frustration.

Answer 1

There are many elements to slow performance and it's likely to be an iterative process to solve the issue.
That said, there are some differences that are having an effect.
First off, are you, or the majority of your clients in the Ukraine? If no, why host your site there?
If you're NY-based I'd expect you to be pitching to NY-based clients, so moving your site to someone who has servers in or around New York would make a big difference - it would eliminate some 300-400ms latency on every request.
There's also a difference server-side that's affecting your site.
For every Safari-hit the server closes the connection immediately after serving the requested file. This contrasts to Chrome where the server uses Keep-alives to allow the next request to traverse the same connection. Forcing Safari to initiate a new connection (with its associated 400ms latency) for each object is contributing to the problem. This is not something that you can control from the client side - the server is forcing the connection closed, so it's absolutely something your hosting provider should be taking care of.
In addition to that, your cache headers are wrong. You're not properly caching your data, which forces the browser to make more round-trips (there's that 400ms round trip delay again), only to be told that the image hasn't changed. Again, this is something that's controlled server-site... the server should be telling the client to cache the data and not bother re-requesting it for some period of time.
That said, it's not all about your hosting provider (although I have to wonder why they're setup the way they are - do they charge by the number of hits to your site?). There are some design elements in your page that are adding to the delay.
For example, your image rotator is pre-loading all the images, but the images are not properly tagged and as such they block the page render (the browser has to load the image before it can decide how to render the page). Adding size tags to these images might help, but ideally they should be lazy-loaded via a javascript that's triggered on the DOM Complete event (so they're loaded after the page has finished drawing, without blocking the page render).
Since these are used in an image rotator they are not initially displayed and therefore could be lazy-loaded during the 'thinking time' while the viewer is reading your page, deciding where to click next.
Unfortunately, this is one of the tricker design elements to code because each browser acts a little differently. Cleaning up your HTML, though, should help.
So that's my first pass... like I said there are likely to be multiple components to this
It also shouldn't be too hard to load your site onto a closer server to see how much that latency is adding to your site. I think you might be surprised (unless, like I said, your clientele are in the Ukraine/eastern Europe, in which case it makes sense to host it there).