I wasn't able to connect most of the time for the past few months - but it wasn't because of the speed, but simply because DNS here didn't resolve forum.exetools.com at all, as I found in the end.
As a workaround, I resolved it somewhere else, put the corresponding IP address into the hosts file and everything is good... until the forum changes IP, of course
(OK, a better solution would be to use a different DNS, I know.)