Hello,

I am a pretty new user here, but I registered a while back and have been trolling the forums going through many reviews and discussions about web hosting. I am a complete newbie when it comes to webhosting but I recently rented two dedicated servers and I've been experiencing some problems with them.

The main server keeps going down every now and then (According to pingdom) and this annoys the hell outta me, so I decided I'll try and asking you experienced guys here to help me out.

Here are my server specifications:
{Intel i7 920
2x 4x 2.66+ GHz
8 GB DDR III} x2(one server to serve the user, the other to run the resource intensive scripts)
OS - CentOS 64 bit (latest?)

Could any of you tell me what would be the best Webserver (Nginx, Litespeed etc) to run so that my pages are loaded faster?(My website becomes extremely slow at peak hours..about 500-600 people on at the same time)
I have already turned gzip compression on.

Also I recently followed this tutorial: hikaro.com/linux/manual-install-nginx-with-cpanel-apache-in-proxy-mode.html

And ended up screwing up bigtime as none of my .htaccess mod_rewrite's were working, for now I just changed back the apache port to 80 and it seems to be working worse than before.
So is there anyone here who would be willing to get everything optimized on my server and make nginx work/remove nginx?
I am willing to pay for the above job.

Thank you!