WordPress site slow to connect with database

Hi guys,

Hope you’re well.

Information:
https://www.niksquared.com
wordpress version: 3.3.1
plugins: 8 active plugins

When visiting the site it can take anywhere between 20 secs to up to 2 minutes for the site to even START loading. Same issue with logging into admin. Creating posts and navigating wordpress in the back end takes an eternity.

I disabled all the plugins but this doesnt resolve the issue at all. The problem also occured with earlier versions of wordpress, but lately it is getting too slow.

The issue isn’t with the site loading, but seems to be with connection to the site. I’ve contacted my hosting company (hostmonster.com) many times over the past 6 months and no solution has been found. When i host a normal html site with the same hosting account it loads up fine, which makes me believe the problem is with wordpress as opposed to the hosting account.

I’ve tried looking into sql queries, but my knowledge of this is very poor. One query is below, but have no idea how to fix this. Does anyone have any suggestions on this or other ways to fix my site?

Mysql Slow Queries:

# Thu Jan 5 23:31:01 2012
# Query_time: 7.389363 Lock_time: 0.025868 Rows_sent: 1 Rows_examined: 517
use niksquar_wrd1;
SELECT p.* FROM wp_posts AS p WHERE p.post_date < ‘2011-09-12 19:14:18’ AND p.post_type = ‘post’ AND p.post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY p.post_date DESC LIMIT 1

There are more slow queries but this one seems to be one of the longest.

Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Nik