I've been switching hosts using a VPS each time and I'm just really not sure I'm finding the right VPS's. I've used a VPS from burst.net & rubyringtech and I just feel like it's slowly killing my site because of the slow speed. I really don't know if it's the network or the VPS itself but I really wish to fix this. When I TOP into the VPS peak times it shows this:

top - 03:18:56 up 16:33,  1 user,  load average: 1.33, 1.40, 1.33
Tasks:  30 total,   1 running,  29 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 27.2%us, 13.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 59.2%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1048576k total,   679712k used,   368864k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,        0k cached

And pages take atleast a good 2-3 minutes to load. I have only like 50-60 members on the forum also. I had a shared hosting account and the forum was lightning fast.... Is a VPS a bad idea? :\

What should I do to fix this? I'm running lighttpd with xcache, and the latest mysql + php version. The server is a intel i7 2600 w/ 1gb uplink (I think the 1gb uplink is a lie because I've tested the network and the highest download speed I've seen was 20mb/s from a code.google page)

All in all I've seen people talking about linode. Should I try them? I honestly don't need a dedicated server yet it's only 50-70 members online. What should I do? I really want a VPS because I enjoy root access. Does anyone have any suggestions?