cluster the webs is usually a good solution, all connection to a standalone/cluster mysql solution.

you can start with getting a decent hardware raid controller. And you should have more than 4 disks.. Regular sata disks has 150~ IO Regular sas disks has 200-300~ IO and ssd disks has 10000+ IO Rough numbers :) Alt of random reads on the disk from a huge amount of users will give you problems when ...

I second SoftLayer network. I have personally used them and would use them for any high bw project i will run in the future

My best bet is to change to some more quality connection providers.
Getting 10Gbit speed at budget prices is kinda asking for it

fdc isnt know to have the best routing.

They also have different locations. so you can start with mention what location you are using.

Usually the best overall locations is chicago, new york, washington dc and netherlands for covering north america and europe. Where most of the paying customers are.

Follow the install instructions and use apache or litespeed

One solution is to build up a iprange ban list that covers the big datacenters.

CSF software firewall supports clustering. So you only need to ban the range on one server and it get distributed to the others.

Do you have the nginx mod ?

agreed

Install CSF firewall, tune the incoming and outgoing ports, run it in test mode first. Then run it in production mode when you are sure its working.

All servers should have a firewall running on it.

Hard to say what the blank connections is. maybe ipv6?

1. Do you run web and fileserver on the same server?

2. Do you use nginx mod?

3. you can install CSF firewall and use the connect tracker function to limit connections per IP

If mysql is getting slow due peak hours, your amount of delayed index.cgi will just grow.

run mysqltuner.pl on your server and make sure its tuned.

Do you use nginx mod on your fileservers?