[Boss-Hog]

Yes, I wasn't sure of the proper forum for this thread, so I posted it where I thought it best fit.

I was intentionally vague in my original post because while I knew additional details would be necessary to make any kind of real recommendation, I wasn't sure exactly what was needed. To clarify, most of the posts I attempted to prune were completely unnecessary in that the site is somewhat time sensitive (it's a baseball discussion site) and the posts I had started deleting dated back as far as 2005. They're not truly necessary, but I never gave serious thought to delete them until it was suggested that was a major part of the current problem. Additionally, we've had a large number of threads out there for some time and these performance issues didn't start until a couple of months ago, so unless we hit some "magic number", I highly doubt pruning a large amount of old posts will completely resolve the problem.

The statistic package my site uses is Awstats, so anything that package can provide, I can post here, if needed. I'll start with my list of currently installed addons - I have not made any major changes in that regard in some time:

Admin Log In As User
Banned Members Filter by Rafael Lopez
Display Number of Spiders
Enhanced Captcha Image Verification
Flashchat 4 Integration
Guest Tracking
Live Topic
Members who are using Flashchat 4
Most Recent Searches
Multiple Login Detector
Passive Video [Lite]
Sakera's Hide Poll Result
Smilies in Quickreply
vBCode table
Who Has Read a Thread

We typically have ~125-150 users online at a time between guests and registered members but since this is a baseball forum, that number can occasionally be significantly higher, such as during baseball games or after a significant event (trade, free agent signing) occurs. The amount of visitors we receive now is in line with what we received months ago prior to this happening, so if that's any indication, the number of users alone shouldn't be the root cause. In December 2010, we generated 55.15 GB of bandwidth; on average for 2010, it was 62.34 GB a month. My total database size is 1.76 GB. Per Awstats, for the month of January so far, from 1/1/11 to 1/20/11 at 4:30 PM EST, we have received: 21,352 Unique Visitors, 88,916 Number of Visits, 1,452,438 Pages, 6,420,582 Hits and 21.79 GB Bandwidth (256.94 KB/Visit). My image storage method is storing items in the database and has been set to that for quite some time.

Snakes is correct in assuming that with the status quo, I can not change the server configuration due to being on a shared server. I don't know the first thing about server management, so I would assume I'd need my hosting company to handle that. I do not have any specific needs such as RAID. My two objectives with this thread are to determine 1). If I would be better served switching hosting companies and 2). If not, which of the packages that HostPC offers best meets my needs (instead of just assuming the most expensive VPS is what we need). Again, if there's other information you need from me in order to offer your advice, please let me know what it is and I'll do my best to provide it. Thanks again for everyone's help.