Hello Folks,
The host responded with this:
"Thank you for contacting us.
We have found some unnecessary connections to the server and have had our engineers eliminate those.
These are small kind of DDoS attacks which cause flooding and slowness.
If this continues tomorrow for your site, please let us know and we can run your site through our CloudFlare DDoS protection for you and manage it as well.
The site is responding better now."
While the site is working well now, and I anticipate it to continue working quickly, please post here if you notice sluggishness. Thanks!