It's probably because you're on a different version of minecraft than the servers you're trying to load up. Usually servers are up to date, so if you keep to an older version for mods/texture packs or whatever reason, I would recommend just switching to the most up to date version of Minecraft when you want to go online, and then go back to your current version when playing singleplayer.
It can be caused by a number of things, including slow internet connection which can be either client or server side and sometimes the Minecraft servers go down, you can check this on the Mojang website,
check your internet connection
Not all images load slowly. This depends on your Internet connection, the traffic at the servers, the size of the image and the speed of your computer.
It all depends on your computer specs and internet connection. The more powerful your processing power is, the faster it will load the files needed, the faster your internet connection is, the faster it will connect to the servers.
create a new profile on the new minecraft launcher and then go into the edit profile option and you can change the version to 1.5.2 and now you can just load it up and play on old 1.5.2 servers.
Excessive load on existing servers Fault tolerance To isolate a new application
Load leveling is a process of making sure the server or servers do not go above a certain percentage of task load. Load balancing is another means of taking several servers and distributing the compute load so that individual servers do not get overloaded with requests.
If you are the host of the Server, you open up Minecraft Server . Wait for it to load then it will say its ready. If you are going to someone else's server, and it has no bars, then there server is not active. (Which means they dont have Minecraft Server up).
The Linux Load Balancer helps servers stay balanced when there is a lot of activity on the servers. The Linux Load Balancer is a brand that has a site where more information can be found.
its not the site, i use this site a lot and it works perfectly fine, its either your computers CPU or your internet router sucks or your internet provider sucks
The load load balancing solution is recommeneded on linux based servers although not necessary it will improve load performace.
There are numerous sites available on the internet like Speakeasy which can provide you with both upload and down load speeds from different servers for free. See: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/