Slowdown Update: As it turns out, the slow-down experienced during the last week of July was the result of a very large surge in users joining the project through a new campaign by http://charityengine.com. As the servers were behaving properly - just overwhelmed - and DK was on a well-deserved holiday, it was difficult for the rest of us to pin-point the cause. You can see the recent surge here.
We are looking at changing/expanding our webserver frontend to be more resilient to surges like this in the future. Yet again, we apologize for the frustration caused. -KEL