[BirdOPrey5]

How much traffic do you have- how many online users max during the day?
I used to be on siteground and they told me we had to go to a dedicated server, then I moved to URLJet.com and they have been great, I've been fine on their basic shared hosting plan, less than $25 a month and they cater specifically to vBulletin installations with servers tweaked for best vbulletin performance and they can even install/manage/upgrade forums for you- vbulletin is all they do. If you have on average less than 250 users online at once I'd bet you could get away with their shared hosting if you're careful how you setup your forums, maybe not use server intensive stuff like 'similar threads' search.

Second, if you have any appreciable amount of traffic and I'd guess you do you should have a subscriptions system, this is built into vB so it's not hard just sign up for a paypal business account (free) and make a couple of subscriber usergroups... I have a $2/month, $5/month, and even $10/month plan, the latter has no extra features over the $5 plan but was just for people willing to contribute more and I still have a handful of people using this option... but whatever amounts you choose should not be a problem to bring in enough for hosting and licensing costs, and Google ads are just icing on the cake. If you don't have enough users to make subscriptions useful then you definitely don't need a dedicated host. I didn't disable anything for my 'free' users I just give my premium members extras- extra PM space, larger avatars, ability to delete their own threads, stuff like that- very easy to set with usergroup permissions.

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Well I did a search and assume WebkinzCoast.com is your site... max users online 311, current 61, 168 visited so far today... You are definitely at the cusp of benefiting from a dedicated or at least virtual host but I think you'd be OK on a shared host from URLJet as those were very close to my numbers when I moved- the thing is it seems like you have every option that uses server resources enabled... reputation, countdown timers, vb credits, lots of postbit stuff, and who knows what else for registered members... unfortunately your at the size you need to make some choices... you could probably get away with a cheap hosting plan if you streamlined your site to concentrate on making and reading posts and put some of the 'fluff' away until you decide you can afford a dedicated server, or you start charging for access and go the dedicated route sooner than later.

In any case you need to change hosts at the least as I found performance horrible and would probably not waste my time there if I wasn't trying to check it out specifically- it's very annoying when sites become unresponsive to users. You obviously have some very dedicated users willing to put up with this but it's probably hurting bringing in new members.