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Should have used nginx, or at least put cloudflare in front of it

Turn off KeepAlive, if it's on.

Bad advice. That's likely to make it a lot worse.

I disagree with you based on experience, but you don't have to take my word for it. 'patio11 also has had some experience here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memo...

Also disagree with you based on experience ;)

patio11 blog is HTTP only but this blog is HTTPS.

HTTPS without keepalive is likely to kill any cheap VPS, establishing HTTPS connection is intensive.

That being said, the core of the issue is that they should use nginx (or apache in mpm-events). And they should have cloudflare.

I guess we're going to just wait here until OP delivers the answer for why the machine couldn't answer enough requests :)

establishing HTTPS connection is intensive

More intensive than adding numbers together, sure, but computers are pretty fast. If you're doing 100k connections a second you might have to give some thought to that. Meanwhile, if you have KeepAlive on, 2~5 clients per second will kill you.

you can always just use an s3 bucket