I noticed this site was running slowly the other day after I installed a Beekeeping Blog on my server for Dan. I figured out the culprit was not the connection to the server, but the fact that Rails and Apache seemed to be hogging all the memory. So, after some serious geeking out these past couple of days, I've switched to nginx which passes off to Phusion Passenger for this site and a standalone php-fcgi for the Wordpress site. I'm happy to report that things seem to be running much faster now.