DWHS.com vs Lunarpages vs Mediatemple

I'm currently running a drupal site www.comagz.com/webmagazine/ on dreamhost shared hosting and it runs fine until I get traffic spikes in which the server fails to serve pages. Each traffic spike is about probably 10,000 visitors in an hour. This is just my estimation, sitemeter shows me around 5000/hour and it only counts the pages that loaded successfuly. (slashdotting)

I want to switch to dedicated (virtual or physical) hosting that can handle the spikes. I'm willing to spend about $100/month.

Checked the options here on drupal.org and found (by elimination) that the feasible options are DWHS Lunarpages and Mediatemple.

Here is my basic data from their websites:

DWHS.com

http://www.dwhs.com/dedicated-plans.htm
Cost:$100 Memory:2G DIsk: 20G BW: 225G
Pro: Payment monthly !
Con: No root access on dedicated server
Con: Virtual not physical.
10 MPS pipe ??? - don't know what it means.

Lunarpages
http://www.lunarpages.com/plan3.php

Dedicated $99 512M 80G 1000G - Intel 2Ghz Celeron!
Setup $99 returned on 4th month

Con: Cpanel +$35/month. Webmin included.
Con: Celeron CPU

Mediatemple
http://www.mediatemple.net/services/webhosting/dv/linux-pps/

Dedicated virtual Standard:
dv base $50 256 , 4, 100
dv rage $100 512, 9, 300
dv extreme $150 1G, 18G, 500G

Dedicated virtual PHP Performance (Zend technology php supercharged):
base $69 256 RAM 4G storage 100G bandwidth
Rage $120 512 9G 300G bandwidth

Con: ALL PRICES IN 2 years upfront payment. (big con for me!)
root access - Yes

Now to my question: Please let me know what is the most important factors, what is the implication of the factors in general:

1) Celeron CPU on non virtual server against virtual server with better CPU?
2) Lack of root access (DWHS) ? What is the limitation for me as drupal multisite installer?
3) Do I need Cpanel? (+$35/month on Lunarpages) What is the added value over webmin?
4) Low RAM 256M (of Mediatemple low end accounts)
5) What is the implication of the zend php supercharge technology (in Mediatemple)?

6) What would you choose?
7) Any other considerations I should take into account? Do you have experience with these hosts and being slashdotted on similar machines?
8) Other hosts I should consider?

One small request: If you give example of a site please give numbers. How many visitors/hour on the traffic peaks etc. If you say you run high traffic site it doesn't say much without numbers and examples.

Thanks, Nir