Hi Jeremy,
I’m wondering if you have any advice on the following. I’m running an experiment (https://farm.pcibex.net/r/ldGLsD/) in which people have to watch some videos and decide between some other videos. The issue that keeps coming up is that every once in a while the preload will simply take forever for participants to download or will simply not download at all. The file is not too big (~55MB), so a long download is a little surprising. I’ve warned participants (at many points) to use a desktop and to do the experiment on firefox. And, they have told me that, indeed, they are. Yet, this keeps happening for what appears to be a somewhat “random” subset of participants. In my many tests of the experiment, I haven’t ever encountered the problem.
Do you think this is a server issue? I’m currently hosting on Dreamhost using a shared hosting service. I’ve talked to them to see if there is a server issue on their end, but they didn’t report any outages during the times my participants were having issues. But, I was considering moving to a VPS to get a bit more control to see if this might help. But, I wanted to see if you think there is something else I can be doing to get these downloads more consistent?