Looking for Slow Loading Site Help

[escalatoraccident]

Hey,

Just reaching out to see if anyone has had issues dealing with slow sites. I'm working on a new WordPress Project - building a directory.

I'm on HostGator shared hosting which has always been plenty fast for me, however with the directory I have almost 3,000 categories and it's super slow. I'm using the US States as top level categories, and many (definitely not all) cities as sub cats.

I don't know if WP just can't do it, or if I need to think about a more dedicated hosting plan. Like a VPS hosting I can scale up. It's a new project, so I don't want to pay huge $$$ for dedicated hosting, but bumping up the the $20s for a VPS to test might be OK.

Anyone have any experience with this?