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Well, I'm a hosting provider in real life (already talked to Mike about this a few months ago and determined that we weren't a good fit for him) but I can dissect what they told you a bit more.
They run a program called "procwatch" on their shared servers. What it does (in English) is monitor the resource usage of each site on the server (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) and assign limits to each site based on those numbers. The reason is so one site doesn't run rampant and take the whole machine down. As an example, assume that there were 5 sites on the machine... they could set it so that each site only can use 20% of the total memory, etc.
This is an incredibly dumbed down explanation, so don't put any stock in the numbers, but you get the idea.
Mike, from the bandwidth numbers you gave me a few months back, I think it's just a question of an enormous amount of traffic for a site on a shared server. As much as you don't want to hear this, I think it is time for a dedicated box.
If you do that, make sure it's truly a dedicated box and not a "virtual private server" or anything like that.
Another thing you probably don't want to hear, but I think would be a good idea, would be to tier the membership to two levels "free" and "premium" like HoFo did. With the dedication of the members here, I think you could get enough of the users like myself to pony up a few bucks a year for a "premium" membership to offset the cost of the dedicated box. Count me in as someone who would be happy to pay. IIRC I paid $36 for a one year membership at HoFo. Geez, it's $3 a month. That's one less beer at the sports bar on a Saturday.
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