struggling with shared hosting resource limits, time for cloud?

hey folks,

just hit a user milestone on our SaaS app (it's a niche project management tool). we've been on shared hosting since day one, and it was mostly fine for the first year. lately, things are getting sluggish. pages take longer to load, sometimes we get random timeouts, and users are complaining. i'm pretty sure we're hitting our shared hosting's resource limits.

it's getting a bit frustrating for our users and for us trying to keep things running smoothly. we're seeing a few consistent symptoms:

• often see "database connection error" messages.
• cpu usage alerts from the host are frequent.
• website just hangs for a few seconds before loading, or errors out completely.

i've tried a few things to mitigate this, like optimizing some slow database queries and implementing Cloudflare for CDN and basic caching. i also talked to our current host support, but they just said we're exceeding limits and need to upgrade to their "business shared plan" or a VPS, which doesn't really address the long-term scalability issues i'm worried about.

here's a snippet from a typical error log when things go sideways:

[2023-10-27 14:35:01] production.ERROR: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/html/app/Http/Controllers/ProjectController.php on line 123 {"exception":"[object] (Symfony\\Component\\ErrorHandler\\Error\\FatalError(code: 0): Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded..."}

i'm thinking it's time to bite the bullet and move to proper cloud hosting. i'm looking at DigitalOcean, Linode, maybe Vultr. what are the main things i should consider when moving from shared to a cloud provider for a growing SaaS? any specific providers you'd recommend for performance, ease of management, and not hitting those pesky resource limits again too soon? i really want something that offers better scalability without breaking the bank right away.

anyone else faced this jump from shared to cloud?