I would be very interested to learn more about this. It seems the steady state load on the site is not very high:

(Saivann ran Google Analytics on the site for a little while to get traffic figures). Peak of 10 visitors per second, assume a 10x blowup on resources, that's only ~100 reqs/sec steady state, that shouldn't strain any kind of reasonable server. So perhaps the specs of the dedicated server were not what you might imagine.

Perhaps we should move the site over to Jeremy's hosting? It shouldn't be very expensive to serve outside of major press cycles. Once that is done, perhaps we can find/blag some SSL-protected file hosting.