Best/Fast VPS Hosting Companies?

[CoffeeLovesYou]

Hello!
Firstly, let me just say that I have read numerous threads about what host to pick on vB.com and vB.org. However, some are outdated and I know that statistics change from when they were years ago, so I would like some updated information on the best hosts out there.

Background Info and Specs;
Currently, our forum is ran by a Linux centOS MyHosting VPS. The specs are

40GB disk space
6GB RAM
10 Virtual Processors
300GB Bandwidth
1 IP address

Our forum is about to hit 1,500 members, and our daily count of members at the end of each day is over 250 (not including guests). With guests, we have over 500 people view our forum each day. At a given time frame of 2 hours, we have 300 members/guests viewing the forum actively.

We couldn't complain about the speed and uptime before we got as active as we are today. About 2 weeks ago, we had so much activity going on that our CPU hit 100% and our database and site crashed! When that happened, we updated our Virtual Processors and RAM, but now our uptime is beginning to become sluggish. During the day randomly, the site can freeze and take over 1 minute to load, or you get those 'A connection can not be established' messages. Especially at night time, around this time as I am posting this message, it is very frequent.

Now, some companies have AMAZING web hosting. However, their VPS hosting can be totally different. I always used HostGator for my shared web hosting before I had to go with MyHosting for VPS.
Is HostGator's VPS service good? They are very costly.
I see their cheapest Linux VPS is;
CPU
0.57 GHZ
RAM
384 MB
Disk Space
10 GB
Bandwidth
250 GB
However, I would need the Level 3 VPS which comes with cPanel because I have used cPanel since I first started out with websites and it would be weird to switch to anything but it...
CPU
1.13 GHZ
RAM
768 MB
Disk Space
30 GB
Bandwidth
500 GB
which is $50 recurring monthly.

Is there a better host out there than MyHosting? We pay about $40 monthly for what we currently have, which is good considering our 6GB of RAM.
Please help on this subject! Need good host advice, thanks!