There's one thing you can do pre-emptively that'll help: if using a CMS of any kind, use it to build your content as static HTML wherever possible. Dynamic cont

There's one thing you can do pre-emptively that'll help: if using a CMS of any kind, use it to build your content as static HTML wherever possible. Dynamic content sucks when your wee Athlon box is trying to field 100 requests per second. (My blog's currently quiet, fielding no more than 15,000 http requests per hour at any time this year so far(!), although it's been more than an order of magnitude above that in the past month. Srsly, unless you've got massive clustering mojo you are not going to be handling that load gracefully unless you're serving static content.)