Yeah even at the best of times the site generally takes 10-20 seconds to load a page. The reason I think it's HostGator and not any other issue is because it's been happening for the last week around the same time and tapers off around the same time. It just so happens to start around 5pm EST and ends around 5am EST.
I don't know what plan we have with Gator, they do offer dedicated hosting which would put us on our own server if we're not already but the most basic plan is 89.99 and it still may not solve the problem and it's comparable to DreamHost's most economic dedicated plan
Which is more than enough to handle what we have going on right now and keep up with us while the userbase grows from even the most basic configuration with 32gbs of ram which is 2gbs more than HostGator's best dedicated plan which costs 40 dollars more
DreamHost is the way forward for us, performance alone justifies it, but DreamHost also provides DDoS protection and a lot of other perks that I don't think we're getting right now with Gator.
The DreamHost server would eliminate 100% of our performance issues and even the most basic dedicated plan like the one I screencapped would probably last us a 2+ years before we'd even need to consider an upgrade to accommodate more users. It'd definitely be able to handle a few hundred people and I think that's a goal we could achieve in about that timeframe.
Also consider this; when KF went down, our traffic peaked at just shy of 300 people including guests, if the site stayed functional I think we would have seen a lot of people join and stay. So that's food for thought. It may be an investment, but it may also be a path towards monetizing the site like you've wanted to do for a while.
