Installing and upgrading help

The problem I have run into with my mostly empty site is that, at what appears to be intermittent random times the, site is very slow to load and sometimes I get this message:

Error: Database connection failed.
It is possible that the database is overloaded or otherwise not running properly.
The site administrator should also check that the database details have been correctly specified in config.php

I ran into this when I first trying to install moodle and had to restart several times.

I just set up Moodle in my IX Webhosting account a week ago and have been moodling around a only little bit in my spare time.

http://expedioscientiam.net/moodle/

I am much a novice at dealing with mysql, databases, and all the assorted requirements. I have plodded through the docs, understanding some and experimenting to see what happens when I change some aspect.

I have an .htaccess file in the directory which I have used to adjust some php_etc values as well caching per recommendations in http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance#Apache_performance . Live HTTP Headers has confirmed the changes.

Is this error above a problem with my host or is there something I can adjust?

Thanks,