Easier: just put this into your .htaccess on traffic spike. Header append X-Coral-Control "redirect-home" RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx

Easier: just put this into your .htaccess on traffic spike. Header append X-Coral-Control "redirect-home" RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your.domain.nyud.net/$1 [R,L] Or even better, just redirect all traffic with news.ycombinator.com or reedit.com referer (before RewriteRule): RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?ycombinator\.com [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?reddit\.com [OR] You don't even have to manually disable caching after traffic dies down this way.