It's a VPS, not shared hosting.
It's running as suPHP. Web server is Apache.
Thanks for your help Tony.
Well, if it's a VPS then you should be able to use 100% of he resources allocated to you. Not sure of what terms of service you might be violating.
Easiest way see what's happening on your server then is to use the 'top' command in SSH.
One it opens, it will refresh every 5 seconds. You can type 'u' and then the name of your cpanel userr and it will limit the display to just that user's processes which should be ssh and the php processes running that are related to your site.