Drupal Hosting : Drupal loading speed?

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This is a drupal question asked by uk500 on 09 October 2007

I am working on my first Drupal website and have (unfortunately) had some pain in the a55 experiences already.
I have read a lot of threads already but have no conclusive answers, so my questions are as follows..

1)Who is a good host for Drupal where the pages load FAST?
2)I have read that Dreamhost and Servage are good for Drupal site, is this true?, Is their hosting/database on the same server? (I read that seperate databases slow Drupal to snail pace)
3) Is Drupal just generally slow to load?

Here’s the background, ..I am hosted on 1and1 (don’t groan) I am working on a website that has 6 live “league tables” on the homepage (a bit like football league tables). I CANNOT use page caching as the tables would not update.
My site takes at least 10 seconds to load… even though it only contains 25 teams! (out of a possible 100,000)…and that is when it actually loads! more than half the time it just goes to an Error500 page…internal server error.

so what can you recommend?
I think I am pretty happy to change hosts – but to where?

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