On my portal site, when I try and get some mysql stats remotely from my webhost to my server it takes around 30 secs to load the website.

http://r3volution.servegame.org/portal/

//stats for WoW
$con = mysql_connect("teamr3.servegame.com", "", "");
mysql_select_db("account", $con);

$sql1 = 'SELECT * FROM characters WHERE online = "1";';
$result1 = mysql_query($sql1);
$count1 = mysql_num_rows($result1);

$sql2 = 'SELECT * FROM characters;';
$result2 = mysql_query($sql2);
$count2 = mysql_num_rows($result2);

$sql3 = 'SELECT * FROM accounts;';
$result3 = mysql_query($sql3);
$count3 = mysql_num_rows($result3);

$online_wow=@fsockopen ('teamr3.servegame.com','80',$errno,$errstr, 0.5);
if($online_wow)
{$color = 'lime'; $wow_status = 'Online';}
else{$color = 'red'; $wow_status = 'Offline';}

Any idea why it is taking so long to load?

Nothing stands out from the code. I would suggest putting some debugging lines in to time how long it takes between the sql statements (including before and after the initial mysql connection and database selection)

You're pulling the entire contents of the characters table and the accounts table out of the database just to count how many items are in each.

As a start, change to using the count function, eg:
$sql3 = 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM accounts;';
$result3 = mysql_query($sql3);
$row3 = mysql_fetch_row($result3);
$count3 = $row[0];

Then if your "online" field only contains 1 or 0 you could also use SUM(online) to return the online count, ie. the first 2 queries would be replaced with:
SELECT COUNT(*),SUM(online) FROM characters

Yes that is the problem, but

$sql3 = 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM accounts;';
$result3 = mysql_query($sql3);
$row3 = mysql_fetch_row($result3);
$count3 = $row[0];

Is returning nothing

When I run SELECT COUNT(*) FROM accounts as a query it returns the correct value but on the site it is returning nothing.

My mistake - that last line should be:
$count3 = $row3[0];

Thanks much, works great!

I think you're selecting too much at a time