The reason why is simple - server load. With image views in the hundreds of thousands a day, and now regularly seeing over 600 users online, even our new server is struggling to keep up at times.
So, as a stop gap measure we're running 2 web server programs on the same physical server. Apache, which builds the page you see (everything except the picture) which needs all the fancy options such as PHP and MySQL interoperability, and is all generated in realtime on the fly, and thttpd which is a very basic http server which is best at just pumping out raw data. This change has decreased server loads by 50%.
Because both programs cannot share the same port (80), and because this is only a test run, the basic server is running on port 81. If you're still reading after all that, and if we decide to keep this setup, then we will be able to run both on the same port, just on different IP addresses
Bear with us for a few days.