Hello everyone! I know all about the certified hosts link at the top of every page, that's not what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is what makes them better than the others out there?

Currently I'm using 1and1 and I've noticed it seems a little slower than most other sites. I currently only host a Zen Cart site on there but I do use another domain for some light file sharing and image hosting. I did find a few threads where people have tried 1and1 and found them to be slow as well and upon moving to other hosts their sites sped right up.

Some things I've noticed about 1and1: The PHP Memory limit is set to 20M (though phpinfo says 40M). The MySQL server is on a separate server farm in the datacenter (other hosts use MySQL on the webhost). Beyond these two things, what else should I be looking for in a web host? Or for that matter are those two things I noted even an issue? I suspect I can't get 1and1 or any other host to up the php mem limit but a VPS would let me do it (I'd essentially have full control over the host parameters).

Thanks,
Joel