Server is struggling; please advise!

Hi everyone ... here is my situation:

My server (a RAQ4 upgraded to 512MB ram hosted with 4webspace) has been struggling the last couple days. Sometimes it's fine, other times the cpu usage and memory usage are in the "Severe Problem" area on my control panel, and the CPU load is over 10. Here is what 4webspace tech support said about the problem:

"You server does seem to be extremely busy. Just today, your dosgames site alone has receieved over 250000 hits. So far this month you have used 45.881 gigs of transfer. You may wish to upgrade the memory in the system if you want to continue with this volume."

The site referenced there (dosgames.com) uses php but no mysql database. The only real change in volume lately is a new php/mysql based site I started about a week ago, it uses a database to store site content. This new site gets 3-5k page impressions per day. It's causing real problems because the sites often go down. Eventually the server corrects itself ... if I reboot, there is lots of memory free for the first while ... then it gradually reduces down to nothing. Right now:

Code: 
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           504        297        207        196         17         94
-/+ buffers/cache:        185        319
Swap:          133          0        133
Code: 
  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 1901 mysql     11   0  6708 6708  1472 S       0  7.8  1.2   0:11 mysqld
  477 httpd      5   0 14732  14M  6752 S       0  6.9  2.8   3:55 httpd
  461 httpd      5   0 12688  12M  6748 S       0  6.7  2.4   3:11 httpd
  475 httpd      4   0 14340  14M  6752 S       0  6.5  2.7   3:52 httpd
  487 httpd      2   0 13180  12M  6736 S       0  6.1  2.5   3:23 httpd
  417 httpd      9   0 12564  12M  6748 S       0  6.0  2.4   3:18 httpd
  415 httpd     16   0 14536  14M  6744 S       0  5.8  2.8   3:54 httpd
  416 httpd      9   0 10980  10M  7240 S       0  5.8  2.1   3:29 httpd
  458 httpd      4   0 12944  12M  6752 S       0  5.6  2.5   3:22 httpd
18974 admin     10   0   924  924   676 R       0  3.5  0.1   0:01 top
 3804 mysql      2   0  6708 6708  1472 S       0  3.1  1.2   0:08 mysqld
  413 httpd      1   0 13548  13M  6752 S       0  0.7  2.6   3:34 httpd
 1247 mysql      1   0  6708 6708  1472 S       0  0.7  1.2   0:00 mysqld
  452 httpd      1   0 13844  13M  6768 S       0  0.3  2.6   3:24 httpd
  476 httpd      1   0 13356  13M  6756 S       0  0.3  2.5   3:33 httpd
  478 httpd      2   0 13596  13M  6760 S       0  0.3  2.6   3:33 httpd
  418 root       3   0  1304 1304   912 S       0  0.1  0.2   0:01 sendmail
  443 httpd      2   0 14240  13M  6760 S       0  0.1  2.7   3:36 httpd
My questions are:

- With this amount of traffic, does it seem reasonable that the server is just overworked and I need to buy something faster & with more RAM?

- If not, are there settings I can change that could improve/fix these performance issues?

Thank you so much for any replies ... I'm trying to decide what to do, I don't mind getting a new server (I'm thinking from servermatrix.com) but I don't want this same thing to start happening once I get the new server ... thanks again all!

 

 

 

 

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