Hey everyone, Thanks for your feedback. One of Dreamhost's customer service people finally noticed that the VPS wasn't set up properly. He fixed the problem after my server crashed and wouldn't restart after a manual reboot. Before I moved to their VPS, page load times were fine, the problem was that I was overloading their server and getting booted. After moving to VPS, I wasn't overloading the server, but page load times were ridiculous 30-60seconds at times. I did make a few changes that seem to have drastically lowered server load. Switching from W3 Total Cache to Supercache and from NoSpamNX to Bad Behavior. My server loads are almost non-existent now which makes sense based on my combined web traffic. By Pingdom, my sites seemed to load much faster with w3 total cache, but it seems to be harder on server resources than Supercache. Everything's working fine for now, and I'll wait before I switch hosting since I don't need another headache. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful responses, I really appreciate them.
Good to hear it's starting to work out for you! Careful though, running WP on hosts with little to no WP experience can be dicey. I do recommend making regular database backups, just in case