50,000 hits in a few hours will do that to a site. Time to upgrade.

Depends. 50k hits in 3 hours is 5 hits a second. I could serve more than 10 hits a second on the first web server I ever set up, in 1994, on an SGI Indigo 2 with maybe a 250MHz CPU and 256 megabytes of RAM, using NCSA httpd, which spawned a new process for every hit. Under IRIX. While I was using it as a workstation. Also, doing a reverse DNS lookup for every hit for the access log.

My current home page, http://canonical.org/~kragen/, benchmarks at 4000 requests per second with ab on localhost. That's roughly a thousand times the load you were under. This is not because our server is a thousand times faster than yours. (It's a dual-core 2.4GHz Celeron, running Apache.) This is because your server is doing a thousand times as much work as it needs to in order to serve that page.

I'm asserting that your server isn't a thousand times slower because a thousand times slower would be a high-end eight-bit microcontroller. An Arduino, say. Feel free to correct me if your server is in fact running on an Arduino or equivalent.

I've had my tech guy speed things up. Got off shared hosting, on a VPS and should have things sped up all around. Still need to cut all the javascript in the current theme, but that's another project for another day.

The JS might actually speed things up by allowing you to do stuff on the client that you'd otherwise have to do on the server.