OMG this keeps happening. My website keeps going down with 2000 views per day.

I point my domain name to Amazon Cloudfront with my website as the origin server. Cloudfront respects your page cache, so most requests are served by Cloudfront (cheap and fast) and most users never even touch my original servers.

dreamhost, bluehost, hostgator etc are notorious for this. It works fine at low volumes, but as soon as you are getting a few thousand hits per day, the site is mysteriously unavailable. Their offering is basically a bait and switch. As soon as your volume increases, they encourage you to upgrade your plan.

dreamhost, bluehost, hostgator etc are notorious for this. It works fine at low volumes, but as soon as you are getting a few thousand hits per day, the site is mysteriously unavailable. Their offering is basically a bait and switch. As soon as your volume increases, they encourage you to upgrade your plan.

You have self-identified the issue, "I'm using dreamhost because it's pretty cheap".

If you are running a site that matters to you, get it onto decent hosting. That is probably going to cost a bit more but will pay back in your site actually being available.

People seem to like wpengine (http://wpengine.com) for WordPress.

If you go with some VPS hosting you could stick Varnish in front of the site, it's a while since I used WordPress but it generally seems to struggle when you are getting a lot of concurrent connections even with something like Super WP Cache. I wrote a thing for Smashing about the really basics of Varnish: http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/04/speed-up-your-...