shared hosting

My web host uses CPanel and I get 2 TB of space with unlimited domains for just $144/year. CPanel comes with Fantastico, which is the only way I've been able to get Drupal of any type working so far, but I can only install 6.2 that way because that is what Fantastico uses (at this time).

I would like to learn CMS and graduate from Dreamweaver so I can become a more valuable webmaster. But I seem to be caught up in installation SNAFUs and certainly need to upgrade and have the option to use other versions of Drupal.

I have a site that will be heavily used in only six or eight states but they are on different sides of the continental US. I found a really fast host on the east coast with super service, etc, but whenever there is heavy network traffic, it is dog slow on the west coast. I imagine the opposite is true. I found this by doing a tracert and seeing that the big delay was in the middle of the country.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on how to select a host for best performance in this case? It is truly a conundrum.

Hello

I have set up an aggressive static page caching system using Boost module, which I modified to build gzip compressed pages to speed up load times and be able to serve more pages in less time at cuentosparadormir.com. The system works fine with just a few thousand users in a typical shared hosting account, as the content is oriented mainly to anonymous users. Of course javascript and css files are aggregated and compressed (using smartcache module).

Have anyone tried a similar approach? what do you think the limits of such a set up could be, and what should be the next bottleneck I will face for these kind of sites? do you propose any other configuration to create a high performance drupal site in a shared hosting account?