Rackspace is fully managed hosting isn't it? If not, maybe you will want to take a look at Softlayer. Moved there over 2 years ago after getting tired of theplanet's crap. Been a very happy customer since then, we even upgraded our server to a quad core Xeon 4gb of ram, 500gb of hard disk space on a ...
Have you tried restarting apache yet? Also how much optimizing has been done to apache? I hope its running on a linux server, as I found windows to provide some hard limitations
You know they can dsign a new template with a different layout. besides the phpbb 2.x code line wont be supported much longer. When security issues come up and they do, chances are there won't be a patch to upgrade it.
reminds me of the days I use to run a forum. I use to change the template to ...