Apache :: Server IP Making GET Requests

I've spent the last several months working on a huge upgrade of a couple dozen websites. The upgrades include modifying Apache so that visitors who arrive at links pointing to mysite/World/New_York are redirected to mysite/world/new-york. In other words, all my links now default to lower case, and underscores are replaced with dashes.

Unfortunately, publishing it has been an endless series of disasters. My websites are now all crashed, and the server is unbelievably slow. It takes pages forever to load (if they load at all), and I can scarcely publish files online.So the following notice sent to me by my webhost got my attention.

IT appears your own server IP is making GET requests to Apache, causing excessive loading and causing service failures. On today's date, your IP made almost 6,000 connections to Apache:<br><br>

[root@host ~]# grep 64.91.229.106 /usr/local/apache/domlogs/mysite.org | wc -l 5924 [root@host ~]#<br><br>

These were all the same request:<br><br>

64.91.229.106 - - [12/Apr/2014:08:10:10 -0400] "GET /404.php HTTP/1.0" 200 14294 "-" "-"<br><br>
And that made up the total of requests:<br><br>
[root@host ~]# grep 64.91.229.106 /usr/local/apache/domlogs/mysite.org | grep "GET /404.php HTTP/1.0" | wc -l 5924 [root@host ~]#<br><br>