I posted this on an internal list, and thought it would be a good idea to make it public. 

Finally I think I've done most of the fussing with my servers, and I actually backed up and turned off the server that was causing all the problems. It's work is now distributed among three servers. Seems likely that I'll have enough bandwidth.  

And since the AFP app was unplugged by AFP, I now have the freedom to move that server. They were sending the pictures to a fixed IP address, if I ever moved it I would have lost the pics. 

After all this fussing I now see what nirvana would be... 

An integrated web server, registrar and DNS.  

Without all the ads and upsell and pictures of female gymnasts.  

The whole thing in one package, where you configure the sub-domains in the same place as you say where their content is served from and how it is served. One Get Info panel where you set it all up. 

The difficulty in all this is all the different places you have to go and that have to agree with each other in order for anything to work. That's also where the fragility comes from. 

And a reduction of the number of concepts you have to master. Most of them are irrelevant vestiges of the way some engineer who's probably dead used to think about this stuff before anyone understood it.