As of five days ago ( http://blog.npmjs.org/post/75707294465/new-npm-registry-arch... ) we are hosting the registry ourselves; it was previously hosted by Nodejitsu (who still operate a downstream mirror).
As for the download counts, per Twitter ( https://twitter.com/npmjs/status/422823647619710976 ), we removed the download counts because our original solution for those counts (keeping them in CouchDB) wasn't scaling. I am literally, as we speak, working on the replacement system to restore download counts.
And Isaac's LinkedIn title is a joke. I hope that's obvious.