I bit the bullet

And upgraded from a shared hosting plan to a virtual private server. This should take effect sometime today depending on how long it takes to transfer the files. You shouldn't notice any down time but it should greatly improve performance (ie page load times), the "site down" messages should stop, and I hopefully will be able to reenable the file resizing feature for the forums. I'm going to post a chipin feature for the site. If some of you would like to contribute that would be great.