Hi, I can only speak from personal experience, but the majority of my C5 sites are hosted on shared hosting, and I havnt noticed or been told that the sites are loading real slow or crashing, I would definitely say that a VPS is not a necessity when working with C5.

Obviously if the site is enormous and receiving mountains of traffic then a VPS would be something to consider, but that would be a consideration if you wasnt using C5 too.

Thanks for the reply. Who do you use to host your sites? I'd be open to switching, I'm just not sure if I would run into the same problems with another host.

I used the one-click install through softaculous with pacific host and I use the moldy yogurt theme and nobility theme for my sites.

thanks again for the help

I use a company called 1 and 1http://goo.gl/ycAZr, they are not the cheapest around, but I have been with them for years, and never had a problem, the uptime is good, and the support is good too, as @jordanlev stated shared hosting will will probably knock a little off your sites performance but it defiantly shouldnt be grinding to a halt or crashing.

Correct me if i'm wrong @frz but concrete5 do C5 hosting themselves, and if they cant get it right, noboday can ;-)

I concur with @Vidall -- I've installed C5 sites on a LOT of shared hosts, and while occasionally the sites run slower than they should, I've never once had a problem with memory running out.

Using a VPS isn't a bad idea, but if you don't want to incur the additional costs of that, I'd suggest moving to a different shared host.

are you using a blank install, is is there some custom template/functionality that might be greedy in question too?