Cd34, that's a lot of informative links
First I'll have to go over them and look up the patches you talked about before responding informatively to your post.
In short:
It is 1.3.33 Apache (I didn't upgrade to 2)
It is a single celeron CPU.
I played around with the default configs on Apache a bit, but didn't take it overboard since I am hosting a production site on this server. The server is set to max connections of 312. Anything over it makes it unstable.
I haven't bothered with htaccess on this domain other than hotlink protection for movie files... and I'll turn off the reverse dns solution. ExtendedStatus is in the httpd.conf, right? I'll check it out too.
Plus, with your permission, I'll also forward your post to my current host and do a bit of reading on my own.