My host has me over a barrel.  I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?
rcoder: First, you should know that many types of caching will increase your memory usage, not decrease it. The whole point of a cache is to use fast storage (RAM) to keep a local copy of data that would be slower to retrieve from its persistent source (filesystem or DB).Second, 384 MB just isn't much memory for a medium-traffic Drupal site. I would recommend at least a gig of memory, and perhaps more if you use plugins heavily. Drupal is neither particularly lean nor blazingly fast, so you're going to need a lot of Apache listeners working to handle that load, with each process probably consuming 30-50 MB of RAM.Third, you're right to think that you need someone on-call who knows Apache, Drupal, and database tuning and configuration inside and out. A $60/mo. support package isn't going to do it, though. If you think about it, that's really only paying for an hour or two of tech time each month, so expecting to get 24/7 interactive performance tuning and optimization for free along with your support contract is pretty unreasonable. Put a performance guru on retainer, and establish an SLA with them if necessary to maintain your site uptime.Finally, opening >30 tickets in less than a week is not the best way to get quality support. It's like the stereotypical impatient kid on a road trip, asking "are we there yet?" over and over again.My suggestion would be for your to find an experienced LAMP admin who is willing to manage your hosting for you, and pay them a reasonable fee for doing so.