Why is this, is it my shared hosting (hostgator)? its frustrating trying to check what plugins are effecting the site. arrg.
Yes, it is your shared hosting. Most shared hosting is WAY over-provisioned and you will get hugely variable results depending on what is happening for the other sites on you shared host (and how recently your pages were accessed so their content may be in memory caches for the filesystem or database).
Stability and performance cost money and things get better with VPS’s and dedicated hosts.
thanks, would VPN help this swaying issue and also intial connection times?
VPN or VPS? VPN doesn’t make much sense in this context. VPS should help as long as it is provisioned to provide enough CPU and memory to avoid paging and you would be in charge of tuning/configuring the server.