My host has me over a barrel.  I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?
noodle: tweak your apache configuration to see if that will fix your swapping problems. there are tons of articles on what you need to do to do this available online.  sounds like you're just spawning a lot of children that are sticking around to fill up memory and swap space.i had similar problems with a default config of apache on a 256 slice.  if you tweak things correctly, you'll be fine.