How can I detect and survive being “Slashdotted”?

Question

What\'s a good way to survive abnormally high traffic spikes?

My thought is that at some trigger, my website should temporarily switch into a \"low bandwidth\" mode: swi

Answer 1

For sites that experience high traffic, Akamai is a good solution to make the site fast, extraordinarily scalable, and reliable in spite of your own infrastructure. Akamai is a service (not free) which will cache your site a locations around the world. At my last job, our e-commerce catalog was cached via them and our servers could go down and nobody would know unless they tried adding to their cart. Also, we had our image servers go down once and Akamai's caching saved us again.