Will better hosting solve my problem with slow image loading?

Currently have a website with a shared hosting on dreamhost. I've had it for a long time, my only complaint has been that that images load slowly. E.g. I have a lot of pages with hi-res images that might be as large as 300-800 KB each and it might take up 500ms - 1s to load (according to Chrome). This is noticeable when browsing.

So would moving to a better hosting plan or host make the images load faster? If so what would you recommend? Dreamhost has a managed VPS but I gather from reddit that dreamhost is not considered that great (it had a good reputation when I signed up).

> What is your monthly budget?

Don't have a set budget but up to $30 / month would be doable.

> Where are you/your users located?

90% US mostly in SoCal

> What kind of site are you hosting (Wordpress, phpBB, custom software, etc) or what is your use case?

Basically it's an image site displaying photos. Almost all pages are static html, a few PHP pages. Some parts are made with Hugo.

> Do you have a monthly traffic volume? Estimates are ok.

Google analytics says 100-200 uniques per day. Host stats says about 1GB per day

> If you’re looking at VPSes: Do you have experience administrating linux servers and infrastructure?

No would rather have some kind of managed host. I just want to be able to log in with ssh & sftp but have somebody else responsible for upgrades / security /etc. Only need basic PHP.

> Did you read the sidebar/check out the hosts listed there? I've personally vetted these companies and their services are a good fit for 99% of people.

Yes. But I'm not sure if hosting is my problem.