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

Use caching!

If you're using WordPress (for example), you can use something like WP-Super-Cache. If you're using regular PHP there are still a number of options you can use including memcache. Or you can just use regular squid proxy style caching.

Any caching you use will help bulletproof (or slashdot/digg-proof) your site :-)