I've offered a few times to take over admin for the servers, but tony hasn't been willing to hand it over.
Not sure the root cause, could be DDoS related as well as flat out underprovisioning (or db needing optimization, etc).
The software itself is also about a decade out of date.
If he aint willing to hand it over even to you, then i aint got no chance.
Also, network traffic logs would be sweet indeed. This would help alot on painting the picture about whats really going on.
Constant ddos is a valid guess, but i wouldnt place my eggs in that basket.
I like markus's idea of the server being hosted on the cheaper ec2 - when it only has few cores and few gigs of ram then no wonders its slow as hell. DB optimization would probably be overkill tbh since this forum doesnt recieve that much traffic.
Some bot protection and maybe a pump in EC2 instance should make a quite noticable difference.