some follow-up details. The server halted again a few hours ago. The last request made before the halt was:
66.150.96.109 – – [13/Mar/2007:15:25:57 -0500] “GET /?feed=rss2 HTTP/1.1” 304 – “-” “FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com)”
So something from wordpress is causing this issue.