Is shared hosting enough for my forum?

[altdot]

SMF Version: SMF 1.0.5
About a month ago, I posted to webhostingtalk.com a thread asking if my current shared hosting account was enough for my SMF install. General opinion was "no, probably not," but before I search out a new hosting solution, I realized I should check here to see what I really need for performance stability.

A month ago, this was the situation:

A year ago, I got an inexpensive bluehost account and installed SimpleMachines Forum for a small message board. It's now at over 1,000 members, 750,000 hits a month, about 100-150 members online at a time. Several times a week at least, we're maxing out cpu usage on the shared bluehost servers, and getting "You have exceeded CPU" error messages. Server load seems to be pretty consistently 8/2 cpus.

We've got about the same traffic now, but we're maxing out multiple times a day, which is obviously unacceptable. Right now, we're on a shared hosting account, with fantastico installs-- we could conceivably make some of the enhancements (accelerators, etc.) that are recommended in the performance checklist, but before we do that, can someone give us a quick and dirty guess as to whether tweaking will help anything, or if we now need a dedicated server? We're launching a new content site (WordPress with caching plugin) next month, and expect our traffic to increase, so we've got to get this under control before then.

status page
current stats/busy times

[H]

Looks like your hosts oversells a bit. I would class those loads as unacceptable.

You best bet would probably be a VPS. For more information post at WHT (You can also post in Hosts and Hosting although very few hosts advertise there).

[altdot]

Is there a thread here that talks about what specifications I should be looking for in a good host?

[sawz]

have a look in the hosting boards.

[[Dark.Shadow]]

for big boards, you may want to try dedicated servers. But as for the price as expensive as it is $XXX per month, you can try the "Server Settings" there you should be able to tweak some stuff. Also, in the basic settings, removing stuff like "Users browsing this forum" or putting like "Users in the last 160 minutes" will remove some load off the servers u_u