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I've been reading a friends page here for several years now, all without ever noticing any sort of slowdown.  Server seems to be running well..
I don't think getting rid of FTP access is going to solve your problem.. You'll most likely always have more trouble with people giving out thier passwords than anything else..
From the other post or two or three of yours I've read here you're a pretty bright person.. I think the idea of hosting a few game servers would be fine.. Most hosting companies run several servers on one box, so surely you could handle a couple as well as serve up webpages.. Besides, people pay $45+ all the time to host a single game server.. Surely you can find at least one person
I think the idea of using Xen or VMWare or whatever you'd use sounds fairly sound.. Nothing wrong with iscolating things a bit, and any performance loss would be fairly small and wouldn't matter a whole lot..
Going back to the idea of cutting features, if you really want the site to grow, it'd be silly to chop off things like mysql and such..
As far as peer reviews of applications, I didn't even know they got posted to the forums.. I might try to look at a couple every now and then..

I thought there was a new kernel patch that allowed you to boot into the new kernel without really rebooting the system?

There was a question on Slashdot not too long ago about how to handle repeated log in attempts like this.. I think a lot of the suggestions were similar to what you've implemented though..