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

I think the premise is wrong: you really really want to get slashdotted, otherwise you wouldn't have a web site in the first place. A much better question is how do you handle the extra traffic? And even that is really two questions:

1. How do you technically manage the additional server load?
2. How do you greet the new users, so that you can hopefully get some of them to stick around??