The General

I recommend Vultr or Digital Ocean far as VPS. I haven't used shared hosting in years. For now I run my own servers. It's better that way for me, but it works since my user base is over 1.3k

Agree with everyone else, it's likely just bots. If it was a DDOS attack your site would be on it's knees attempting to serve a page

I would change the line PermitRootLogin to no, that way no one can SSH remotely using the root user. If something happens and you need root you could always use the command sudo -s and it will switch you to root using your password.

Have you done a check on what might be consuming your memory? What server OS are you running on? Is it Linux or Windows based? If Linux Ubuntu/Debian or Centos? Either way idealistically for a webserver that's receiving decent traffic (around 100 visitors an hour under a heavy script i.e. IP with +3 of it's addons) then I would suggest at least a dual core vps with an SSD and 1GB of ram. I currently host on Vultr and haven't had any issues.

6

sooooo 12? lol

I used to run a music based forum a couple of years ago, and at one point I had ranks that were headphone based like such:

to me phpfox is easier to manage. PHPDolphin's admin interface is intimidating to me tbh I've seen phpfox sites go from Facebook copies to actual sites because it can be used as a CMS Dolphin not so much

aside from the profile picture I find that layout quite interesting

Addition of profile songs via Youtube, always catches people by surprise

PhpFox is less confusing and can give you more what you're looking for in a social site You can either make it another Facebook or turn it into a dating site or something like that... Plus you can integrate it with vBulletin (a plus imo)