Downtime, Switch Shared Hosts Or Wait It Out

I'm with one of the big shared hosts. Support is patchy at best, which isn't a problem until you require help at which point it's agonising as you have to wait an age to get an unsatisfactory response.

At the moment the server I'm on is suffering from consistent outages (it's been up and down over the last few days). Support has been hard to get hold of at times (right now my site is completely unacceptable for me and there's no-one tending the live support chat - which is the only chance of getting a prompt response).

My question is should I be actively looking to improve my situation (it's amazingly frustrating to spend the best part of a day doing small updates, which because of instability, take hours instead of minutes) or should I just wait until it blows over (to be fair server issues tend to be fairly infrequent, but they do flair up every so often). I can't really afford to pay that much more than I am (say $20-$50 a month max) so am I stuck with shared hosting or is there anyway to pay a little more (my current package costs around $10 a month) to get better support and stability?

After a initial look around would something like MediaTemples GS or the low end MediaTemples dedicated virtual service be suitable? The pages do have moderate database use (a few forums and galleries) and use around 50GB a month bandwidth (which would climb slowly in future months)?