Does it matter if my pings are failing?

I've had the vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator v2.2 installed for a couple months now. I've been having a problem where I'm constantly going over my CPU usage allowance and having to upgrade my hosting plan, but I only have 316 users on my forum. Everytime I look there's Google and Yahoo bots on my site, so I created a robots.txt to tell them not to look at the irrelevant stuff. It seems everything is going well and things are getting indexed on Google, but nothing on Yahoo (although the log shows the sitemap being downloaded every day or two). I looked at the daily update emails and it shows this:

Google ping: FAILED.
Yahoo ping: FAILED.
Ask ping: FAILED.
Moreover ping: FAILED.
Live.com ping: FAILED.

I was reading some suggestions after searching and I modified my php.ini file to set:

allow_url_fopen = On
allow_url_include = Off

However, it's still not working. Any suggestions?

Would like to see the answer here as well. My sitemap has been working great for months, however they all failed today, not sure why. Dont know if we should re-generate, or let it try to go on its own tomorrow, or what.

Hello,

it's not an issue if you will miss some pings. Make sure that you submitted your sitemap manually to Google and Yahoo:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

Google Webmaster Tools - Recommended for All vBSEO Customers

Hi Joey - are you considering getting fully vBSEO enabled? Is there any questions you have that we can help you with.

Our sitemap is very effective, but your SEO is only maxed out when you have it installed with vBSEO also working for you.

Not sure why it stopped updating automatically and emailing me, always worked before. Been doing it manually everyday for the last 2 weeks. Strange

Any thoughts on this? My pings no longer even submit or email me, and I cant figure out why. When I submit manually, it works fine, but they havent been automated since 12/11 now. I just went through all my sitemap settings, and they look like they always have.

Do you have new sitemaps created, but no notification email received or even sitemaps are not re-genera

My sitemap generator history shows the last date of 12/11/08

It does seem like its generating though, because when i go to google and just say re-submit selected sitemap, the URL's seem to increase. But its no longer automatically telling yahoo, google, etc.. to re-get the sitemap everyday