SSL Speed - too slow

[yelir]

Hi,

 

Our site has been using PayPal/2Checkout to handle transactions so far and it has worked out well. Speed has been good and our users don't fill out their payment details until they have reached these sites so we didn't need an SSL certificate up until this point.

 

However, we recently decided to get a real merchant account for the cost savings, which required encryption to transmit the customer data. I installed SSL and the problem now is speed - whereas page loading on checkout used to be a 1-2 seconds, now it can take 5-15 seconds for everything on the encrypted pages to load.

 

I am using shared hosting which I am sure is part of the problem but this host has generally been fast compared to other hosts I've used. Is there anyone out there that gets decent SSL speed using a shared host, or is this just indicitave of all shared hosts? If you are getting decent speed can you point me to the host and a sample page that is encrypted? I asked our host if we could pay more to receive more CPU power but they said that it wouldn't help - that large companies use a CPU per customer when doing SSL to get good speeds so we would need a few dedicated machines.

 

Anyways, what I'd like to know is are there any reasonably priced hosts out there that can offer decent speed using SSL with them? Or is there any way I can increase the speed on my current host (ie configuration that I might have wrong, etc.)?

 

Thanks very much ahead of time.