Long story short, I had been paying way too much for my blogging site and getting less performance than I could for the money. I had been running my server for a few years using a VPS Windows server. A Windows Server with 512 MB of memory is a very different animal from a Linux Server with 512 MB of memory. Of course I am paying less than half per month for my new server and I am getting 6 times the requests per second. Its not even fair to compare a Windows web server to a Linux one in this scenario. IMHO there is no good reason why Windows VPS servers cost about $50-$60 per month.
The good news is that there are plenty of Linux VPS vendors that offer very good hardware for lower prices that can host a much higher performance site than I can get from a Windows Server. I am very happy to be a WordPress customer.