Page Load Speed, Hostgator and Wordpress

[pmeenan]

It's entirely possible that the server load is normally ok but spikes when someone else does a lot of activity, particularly if they are doing a lot of disk I/O or slamming the database. Usually with shared hosting the database server is a different server that also needs to be checked.

A VPS may or may not get you better performance though you usually have a lot more control over the installed software and can install APC and other things that the hosting provider doesn't install.

Is your W3TC configuration set to pre-cache pages? if not it's possible that the long load times are from when the cached version of the page needs to be re-built.