vB4, CPU usage and Shared Hosting
 

A couple of days ago, the company that hosts my site -(since 2 years without any trouble)- sent me an email telling me that my site
constantly uses a large mount amount of the server's CPU resource.

They informed me that my account's CPU usage is 45,000 script executions per day. The industry standard for CPU usage of a shared account is 12,000 (800 per hour). They said I should upgrade to dedicated box if I want them to continue hosting my site.

After I got their email I submitted a support ticket to vB and their response was quick pretty useful.
I've removed more than half of the add-ones and disabled the rest of plug-ins except three, and Disabled -as possible- vB default options that may take server resources.

After all what I've done of optimization/changes to my site, my site's CPU usage now is stil between 20,000 and 25,000 script executions per day (1000 - 3000 per hour).
Please note that I've lost about 16% of my visitors/traffic since the changes I made and that hurts me a lot.

My site is not really big:

• Users: 6,923
• Threads: 8,751
• Posts: 86,666
• Visits per day: 1,200 - 1600 visitor

And here are Statics of May 2010 (last month):

• Unique visitors: 33,974 ==> (Average/day (1095.93))
• Number of visits: 47,228 ==> (Average/day (1523.48))
• Pages: 406,290 ==> (Average/day (13106.13))
• Hits: 3,002,580 ==> (Average/day (96857.42))
• Bandwidth: 15.81 GB ==> (Average/day (522.40 MB))

Now I'm wondering:

1. I was thinking if vB 4.0.4 is good/buggy-less enough (specially RTL and IE6 issues), I'm going to upgrade when it's released, but I'm worried about if there is a big difference in performance so vB 4 will increase the CPU usage and the amount of script executions. I'm asking who have upgraded to vB4 about this, does vb4 use CPU resources and execute scripts more than vB4?
2. Do you think my site is big enough to go to VPS or dedicated hosting? (Please take in mind that I'm not making money from my site yet and it will take time to earn some funds from it, so I want to spend as minimum as possible on site hosting.)
3. If I should get VPS or dedicated box, what are your recommendations for the CPU, RAM, Disk and other stuff?
4. Which is better, VPS or Dedicated box (as I'm expecting my site's traffic will increase about 50% by the end of 2010 if every thing went well)?

I hope you can help me guys, because I'm losing visitors every day and I want things to get back to what they were ASAP.

I really appreciate your advice.

Regards

Sorry for any typo!