I can see you are starting to hit the upper limits of what shared hosting can reasonably provide.
I would say a 4 core anything would be much more than you need. A 2 core VPS with at least 2 GB of RAM should be sufficient for now (but a little more RAM would not hurt!). If you have no experience with managing a VPS, I recommend going with cPanel and certainly with a fully managed VPS provider as you will have a lot of learning to do if you try to manage it yourself. A lot of learning. If you stay with a stock setup, cPanel/WHM will do most of the management for you and if you run into a roadblock, a fully managed provider will take care of things for you when you submit a support ticket.
Since this your hobby site and you do not want to spend much money on it, you could also consider putting some advertising on it to help defray the cost of hosting. A cPanel VPS will consume 9 - 10 GB of disk space with nothing on it. So add your 15 GB website size and you will need at least 30 GB of disk space, more would be better as that would leave little room.
As you can expect, a managed VPS will cost more and cPanel costs money, too. Unmanaged VPS can be had for $20 or so (one cheapy VPS provider offers an unmanaged 4 core with 8 GB of ram for a little over $20, but they do not have a good reputation). Managed with cPanel you can get starting at $30 - $45 a month. That is 18 - 27 British Pounds, which is less than the figure you provided earlier.
It sounds like you’re using a memory hog (CMS, i.e., WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, yadda yadda) to generate your web pages (and without caching, too!). If that’s the case have a look at WHB’s “Specialty Hosting” as they will keep you on a shared host with fewer shares so that you get the CPU time you need for your website. I’d gotten a Drupal account for a client of mine whose only problem was not checking to keep his CMS up to date - “script kiddies” are a problem with ALL canned CMS installations). Rather than an upscale VPS as the price you were quoted seems to indicate, a “Specialty Account” should solve your problem for you very nicely.
I use Quixxo.com and they’ve been really good. What I like best is that they give free support for all the 3rd-party open-source apps (like wordpress) that I download thru them as well as their own software. This was always a problem for me before, like with another web host provider I downloaded a free shopping cart solution, but I couldn’t get it to work! Quixxo has been helping me with wordpress, shopping cart software, newsletter software - so far so good. Also they are fast and I’ve never experienced downtime.
I guess it’s a fair price - it’s $6.99/month but for a one year contract. They don’t do those terrible promotions where it’s dirt cheap but then you find out it’s three years and the price jumps up after the first month.*
Hi
I have experience using site5 and namecheap and I think they have good service they are also have good affordable plans. I have been using it for a while now so you may go have a look to their plans.
Please note that @avstu has specific hosting requirements, which he has explained in this thread. General suggestions are not helpful. Please ensure the hoost you are recommending has a suitable package for his needs. Thank you.