Dedicated Host With GoDaddy Performance

We've been using GoDaddy as our dedicated host for about 2 years now. Throughout this time our performance with them has slowed. We have 2 eCommerce websites that receive moderate traffic but not outrageous and a few personal websites for ourselves that get roughly nil. Our entire server uses maybe 60GB of traffic a month as reported by plesk.

A fairly consistent problem we have however is page load time. Our server's CPU load reported by uptime is usually very low in the 0.05-0.15 range even during peak hours. So we doubt that the CPU is the problem. Additionally I have tried saving a static copy of our index page and uploading it to another part of the server and the load time between the static and dynamically generated page appears to be identical.

It appears as though our server allows at max 1-2 connections a time per IP address, or perhaps even globally, to receive data at one time. If I load our index page which is fairly image intensive it takes quite some time for the page to load in. It appears as though 1-2 images at a time are typically loading and that's about the limit. My ping time to the server is usually 50-60ms which really doesn't seem too bad to me, or perhaps I am wrong. If I hop over to a site like Google News however their front page contains probably 50 images and they seem to all load in a matter of moments and my ping to news.google.com is actually worse than my ping time to my own server.

For the lifting our server does I feel it's fairly beefy even given that it's a machine approaching 2 years old. It's a P4 3GHz w/ HT, 2GB RAM, 120GB RAID1 HD. The machine we had prior from another host was a Duron 1400 (iirc) w/ around 512MB RAM and 60GB HD and it didn't stumble on these tasks the way our server with GoDaddy has - again leading me to believe it's either some configuration option or is it just the quality of the GoDaddy network that is leading to these slow load times or page timeouts all together.

We recently purchased a new server with GoDaddy a few months ago and are preparing to migrate our current server to the new box - however given the worsening problems with load times we are simply considering moving elsewhere if it's not something that can be fixed with a config file or in Plesk.