My site started having issues on Monday night. The load became enough to start crashing the shared web host that it was running on. Using a content distribution network (CDN) was one option. Another option was to move the site onto a dedicated virtual machine. The latter would cost more, but it would give me the option to do a few more things.
So that’s what I’ve done. The performance sucked this morning. I added WinCache for PHP (this is a WordPress site), tuned FastCGI, and upgraded WordPress and the plugins … the problem went away.
The site appears to be running fine now.