I just received the following email from Annette at our web hosting company, Hosting Matters, the best danged hosting company on the planet, recommended to all our clients:

Doing our best to keep every inbound request answered. Congratulations, Charles, you’ve set a new record for the slashdot effect around here: 115 requests per SECOND.

Note that this intermittent in and out has nothing to do with bandwidth (which is always high each month for this site and is not an issue) and everything to do with the max number of clients that can connect to apache at any one time. Right now, that number is as high as it can safely be set without melting the server.