Of course, I am still working on the slowness issue. Even with page caching, Apache and suPHP thrash the CPU for several seconds the first time a large dynamic page is loaded. I'm trying to narrow this down to either server configuration or a VPS issue.

I have definitely experienced this before on an over-allocated VMware array, so it's a possibility my web server is just on a busy host box. But I'm still tuning things on the server and trying to minimize the load in every way I can, because more often than not these things are caused by configuration oversight or lack of proper tuning (and user naivety perhaps, in my case).

For the past hour or so, I've gotten reports of the site being inaccessible sporadically. I have also seen this myself, as all of my equipment has been down for the past 15 or 20 minutes.

As you can see by this post, the issue seems to be resolved for the moment.

My current service provider is undergoing a management change, and is taking care of some long-standing issues, so hopefully these problems were a result of the firewall finally being set up properly.

My servers already ran great, but it was taking weeks to get any request through. I firmly hope (and expect) to receive better service going forward with the new owners.