Thanks for the words of encouragement guys. The number of on-line users (especially those not logged in ) has been a lot larger than normal and it seems this is what has been taxing the server lately, requiring extra babysitting on my part. Bandwidth is not really an issue these days, my ISP just charges more
, but does not throttle.
Currently the main server is just over a year old and next week I'll be adding some more memory which should help a bit and I have another small hardware update planned a few weeks after that. These updates were planned, but I'll just be moving them up a little early due to these slow downs. I'll try to keep the downtime for these items minimized, but there will be a short amount of downtime with these updates as as I'll be implementing some infrastructure updates at the same time.
As for the idea of adding hardware from various sources, thanks for the offer, but several years ago I moved to tier 1 (i.e. brand name) servers with maintenance agreements just to minimize the effects of any hardware failures, so I need to stick with the same vendor for the updates. In the mean time I may need to disable a few features for users that are not logged in.