What’s the Best Way to Prepare a Website for Sudden Traffic Spikes?

A website can perform perfectly under normal traffic but struggle when there’s a sudden increase in visitors from a campaign, product launch, viral post, or seasonal event.

What approaches do you use to prepare for these situations?

• Auto-scaling infrastructure?
• Load balancing?
• Caching and CDN?
• Database optimization?
• Monitoring and alerts?

Would be interesting to hear how others handle traffic spikes and which challenges they’ve experienced in real-world projects.