I have a website on my server which has a vBulletin Forum. At certain times, the users could reach up to anywhere from 300 - 400 simultaneous connections to the Forum.

Now, I know my server is not suppose to take that much load from 1 website itself and not go overloading but what could I do to get the site going without occuring too much cost on the site?

Would you guys recommend a Dedicated Server to use for the website or would a Shared hosting account be good enough to take care of that? Could it be that my vBulletin installation is incorrect or something? Is 300 - 400 simultaneous connections too much for me and my host?

Hope you guys can help advice on what I should do here.

Plus, I always get errors that "max connection" for the database has been reached and there's a fatal error and etc. Can you guys please help tell me what's going on and what I should do on cases like this.

Should I actually just go to check on my server max connection and etc or should I just leave it as it is. Please do help on this as well.

Thanks so much.