Here's a series of emails between our host and I regarding the problems the board's had recently:

"Hello,

I've been a client of yours for some time now....you guys host
redszone.com for me. When the site's up, the load time is quick and we have little complaints about the site's speed. However, the site goes down all the time....I don't know if it's a result of traffic or what but throughout the day, there are "outages" where the site is totally acceptable. Right now (8:15 EST) is one of those times. Can you please let me know what the problem is so that we can have it corrected? If it's a result of traffic, I'd be willing to listen to paying more if that will correct the problem. Thanks."

Their response:

"I saw this come through yesterday but was able to pull the site up during this time from my home connection. Checked the monitoring servers also and do not show the site was down.. Can verify this by sending you traffic excerts from the logs for this period in question.

As far as site performance, the best think we can recommend is that you move the site to a private server. You are gonna want to do this anyway soon as the legacy platform you are on is going away and any shared sites will be monitored for resource over usage and bandwidth metered billing will be in place. We already know your site uses ALOT of resources
and bandwidth guys, we have seen your site alone crash that server you are on from pure resources being used. Moving to a private server is the only real solution in the long term for your site. To be honest I have been told more then once that your site cost us more to host then we make by the system admins, upgrading to a private server would get the site into a more reasonable billing status for resources used."

My response:

"A few questions...
1). How much would it cost to move to a private server?
2). This would involve creating a mirror of the current site and then setting that back up on the new server, correct?
Thanks."

Finally, their latest response:

"Your monthly fee would be 79.95 and yes we would give you plenty of time for migration before moving the DNS entry"

Well, I'm not sure what our options are but I can tell you that paying $80 a month is not one of them. To anyone out that who's web saavy: we can find a better deal than this, can't we? It looks like we will eventually have to switch hosts - anyone have suggestions for hosting that can handle this amount of traffic but doesn't cost an arm and a leg? Thanks for your help.

Boss