It has been poor over the last couple of weeks or so. I spoke to the hosting company today and they commented that they had noticed a spike in the server load, but cant explain why. BritishBlades is the only site on the server and has exclusive use of the resources, which should be ample for the traffic we get with plenty of headroom to spare. The host was asking about plugins, but the only thing we have plugged in is i-trader and that has been running on BB forever. It's not that. They are looking at the server configuration, but have told me if the performance doesnt improve, they will migrate the site over to a new server FOC.
Apologies for the inconvenience.