I am working on a Magento website, and having a few difficulties with server load. Our site receives around 2,500 pageviews/day on average. I have been working on optimizing the website, and I am sure there is more to do, however I need a quick solution as I am loosing sales.

Currently, the site is located on a HostGator dedicated server (Centos, Xeon 3.3 , 1Gbps Uplink, 16GB Ram, 1TB Raid 1, 25TB Bandwidth). It is running Apache, Varnish, Memcached, and Cloudflare over the top of everything. On low periods, the load averages stay low (0.29 0.22 0.19), at other times they will jump to 6,7,8,9s on the averages.

I had seen some suggestions about using a dedicated SQL server. I have searched and found different providers, however not sure when I need to look for when dealing with SQL servers. I am assuming a SSD would be a minimum, however do I need more RAM or better CPU, or both? The Magento database is 15GB+-. I am also worried about the communication between my web server and the SQL server affecting load speeds for customers, could this be a problem?