How to survive getting Digg'd…
Here is a really interesting post about how Andre Gunter survived 100,000 instant visitors on a small budget.
His site is hosted on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB guaranteed RAM and 1GB burstable RAM. Its not designed to scale ! Andre outlines some of the tips and tools that he used to survive 100k visitors over 1 day.
He leverages using caching and redirecting content to other services. Its a great read and illustrates that you can improve performance with some subtle changes to your software infrastructure.