Yesterday afternoon, I got a 'timed out' message when posting a response to a thread. I just went to another thread and made a posting there. By the time I hit the 'send epistle/Add Reply' button, the load on the servers had decreased and it went right through. Went back to the tab with the 'timed out' message, hit "Try again" and it went through as expected.
Except for messages from the php software that shouldn't come to the user, most of the others seem to be related to the load on the servers. Since I visit very few other boards, except a commercial one ( MFI ), I don't really have any experience to compare with the service we get from ASO. Our church site is hosted on a 'shared' system, but I have no idea how busy they really are.