Note: You must be technically competent to understand most of what I'm saying in this post.

I've been experimenting with our forums on my dedicated server. I'm sure you've noticed that pages take a couple seconds to load on our current host. I'm OCD about 'dat shit so I'm running a dev environment on my dedicated server. I'm running Nginx as the webserver daemon which is way lighter and faster than Apache (the current webserver daemon used by our host). I'm also running FastCGI as the PHP handler on my dedicated.

Now for the info that matters!

When doing a hard refresh on our forum index (ctrl+F5)...
Current host load time: ~3.0 seconds (on average)
My dedicated load time: ~0.3 seconds
Current host time to first byte: 0.3 seconds
Dedicated time to first byte: 0.1 seconds

Absolutely amazing. I'll most likely be getting rid of our host when the contract expires, but that's a while off I think. Just some interesting results for now.