1and1 Issues, So Now Looking For A New Dedicated Server

I'm currently running a dedicated managed business server with 1and1 (UK).

As most of you know their level of service leaves a lot to be desired, and from personal experience this has been dropping even more in the past year. Emails to their support staff sometimes take days before I get a reply. And I've been experiencing server downtime that has sometimes lasted for hours before the server has finally been rebooted, and that from a managed dedicated server plan!

Today for example the server went offline at about 11:00 GMT and didn't go back online until 16:00 GMT, so it was down for 5 hours! Even though I had tried to contact the support staff a number of times during this period. This kind of downtime happens at least once per month and I also get a couple of other shorter periods of downtime most months.

I run a site that has been growing in size steadily over the past couple of years, but I don't think it is overloading the server, so I don't think it is anything I've done that keeps crashing and taking the server offline.

The site is currently getting about:8,000 unique visitors per day.
600,000 page views per month.
60GB of bandwidth per month (this is increasing by about 5GB per month).
20GB HD space (but content is constantly expanding so will eventually need at least 50GB)
But even earlier last year when the site's traffic was still only 20GB a month with 3500 unique visitors per day the server was just as unstable!

I've checked the server logs and the server load is averaging at 1.02 with a peak of 2.62, CPU usage is averaging 24% with a peak of 56% and all other system resources are quite low. Are those figures acceptable? I personally thing they look fine and can't see what could be crashing the server.

Could my site's database access activity be crashing the server? The site uses between 26-80 sql queries per page due to the site being a database directory of over 5000 page entries, with each containing a mix of ajax and web2 technologies to deliver its content. Is that creating a high load on the DB server? Not sure as the server, as mentioned above, only has an average CPU load of 1.02.

Anyway. I'm less than happy with the level of support and service from 1and1 for a managed dedicated server. Even if the server does crash, it should be rebooted quite quickly as it is supposed to be managed. So I'm now actively looking for a new dedicated server.

What would you all recommend based on the current load and traffic my site currently requires?

Budget wise I current spend about £60 ($120) per month so don't really want to spend any more than that if possible.