Hiya,
I'm a professional Linux systems administrator with 15+ years experience with LAMP systems, and I'm confident I can sort this out for you. Indeed I specialise in such optimisation/security/management situations.
To be honest, I think you're probably barking up the wrong tree making blanket assumptions based on very little statistical information (given you've *only* mentioned a load average figure). Either that or you've been lead up the garden path, so to speak, by your service provider who wanted a larger monthly fee.
I could just go and deploy a batch of optimisations for you, for better or for worse. Alternatively, and probably far more usefully, I can help you gather a lot more information and statistics to make more sound and better informed decisions before doing anything if you want to take that approach.
I can give you 3-4 hours of my time for my bid price to look at this, and that can be spread over time to allow analysis of results and multiple 'rounds' of optimisation to get things just right.
After the initial work is done I can move you onto a cost-effective server management retainer to stop issues like this happening again as well.
My customers say of these sort of services:
"Thank you, you're a God-send".
Josh Strike - Strike Sapphire
"Thank god for you being available, dont know what we would do if you were not around."
Matt Norris, Strand International / Easy Play Poker
Yours Sincerely,
Kev Green,
oRe Net.