Probably missing a lot of context here, but wondering why you wouldn't use something like nginx or squid for serving static content, as they are designed for this kind of use case.
Good question -- however, it's not completely static content. The hotel reviews and photos are more or less static (updated only on deployment), however a fair number of the features of the site are dynamic: user accounts, real-time pricing, search, recently-viewed hotels, etc.
Have you considered using something like Memcached or Redis then? There'd be some overhead sending data over a local TCP connection, but I think it would be a lot more memory-efficient.
