My host has me over a barrel.  I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?
lsc: you have 2 options.1. buy a much more powerful server/VPS.for seventy some odd dollars a month you can just leave your amazon ec2 image up all the time, and that's something like 1.7Gb ram.   if you are willing to use a small provider (like me)  you can do even better-  I'll give you 2GB ram for $64/month.   Having more ram makes a lot of problems just go away.  (using a Xen based host also means that you can use swap, which means that your out of memory events would be slowdowns rather than crashes.)2. get a skilled SysAdmin (possibly you)  to optimize your system from a systems standpoint.ultimately, you want both.  But often just buying a better server is the cheapest option.But yeah.  no matter how much you like your host, I recommend that you always have a hot copy of your website/application at another server, ready to switch the dns over at the first sign of trouble.  you should test this periodically.