[j45]

Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike.

Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.

[kragen]

"Concurrent connections" and "connections per second" are two different measures which you are confusing. The second one is basically the same thing as "hits per day", and the first one isn't relevant.