Andrew,

It sounds like your development server is local so the images that populate the slider were loading instantly, but when requesting the images from the live site it took a moment for them to load, and the slider was setting its height before the images loaded. If you're using jQuery for your slider, you can fix this by initializing the slider in a $(window).on('load', function() { ... }); call. One popular solution for these loading problems is to use CSS to create a "loading" window where your slider will be, all styled with a "loading" class, with a preset minimum width/height, and then have the slider remove the "loading" class once it has all it's assets ready.