Is this load normal for the amount of traffic? - he has a pretty decent VPS.
Did you check if there are other things that might be dragging your CPU? Plugins maybe?
Your site seems bloated.. when I visited I got at least 20 ads when clicking through 3 topics.. I’m not sure if this can affect your server but you never know until tested.
Rate limit on + cloudflare template disabled ratelimits everybody as they all use CloudFlare IP’s. You need to turn on cloudflare template to get real IP’s and avoid everyone getting ratelimited.