Recommend me a new host

This site gets a little over 30,000 views a month, it’s not much but for some reason my current host can’t seem to keep up with my sudden traffic surges.

Sometimes I get as much as 1,000 users at the same time accessing the same post, when that happens the site goes from extremely slow to not loading at all, and then it starts giving me a “can’t connect to database” error. The final step is a 503 error, which means the server is overloaded.

I run ads on the site, but I can’t seem to get more than a couple of bucks a month because every time I get a decent amount of visitors the site goes down or is under maintenance, or whatever the hosting people do. Sometimes the site will go down for no reason and it hurts me, mainly because I was hoping to get at least what I pay for hosting back from the ads, and this is not the case.

What I’m looking for is for shared hosting that can handle at least 1,000 visitors at the same time, it doesn’t happen often, but it’s been happening around once or twice a week, and the last few times 500 visitors were enough to bring the site down. The most visitors I’ve had for about an hour was 5,000, and the site was down for 2 hours after that…

I would like to hear from people who also get about 30 to 40K visitors a month, what hosting they’re using and how much are paying. I’m paying about $28 every 3 months, that’s about $9 something a month, kinda expensive for the service I’m getting, and I’m just running this blog, I thought about running a small forum too but I see that would be a very bad idea.

So, any ideas? I don’t think I need dedicated hosting, that would be to expensive for the pageviews I get, but I need something more reliable than what I have.