Hosting / VPS / Shared

[MetalMilitia]

Alright - Apparently the hosting forums are no more? Guess I never noticed

At what point did some of you look into vps or dedicated?

Currently Active Users: 54 (9 members and 45 guests)
My forums database is around 650 megs - ~4500 members, 18,000+ threads - 280,000+ posts.

Shared hosts I know limit the size of the database (at least in my experience they have)

On average theres 4,000-8,000 unique hits and like 10-20,000 page loads. Most months we transfer somewhere around 100-200 gigs between the main site and forums. One of my key concerns is "spikes". I mean you can look in my signature and see the site content - when a major "disaster" happens, we've spiked as high as 80,000 unique hits in a 24 hour period - which the shared hosting didn't take kindly to. It crashed a few times... got my account closed a few times for stealing resources...etc.

"Unlimited" - my a$$

So I just wanted to get some general feedback for some of the mid-level sites out there, get a feel for when you may have decided to switch, or what the turning point was.

Thanks in advance for any responses
-MM-