Any host will be good at their best. The measure of a hosts quality is not how they preform at their best, its how they preform at their worst. If something happens to the server, will/can they go to their data center and fix it? A $2/month host probably doesn't even have their own datacenter. They more likely resell form another host. Hostevery appears to resell www.xo.net.

As for your hostgator argument, many non-serious websites are fine with low quality for the price. Most don't even know there is better.

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The tool I likely used to answer your question.