NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

Ever consider something like using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to help shoulder the burden of serving instead of having to maintain the servers yourselves?
Basically, how it works is you let the provider worry about the servers. You just buy service, and in the case of EC2, upload an image of the server you want to run (it's based off of Xen virtualization).
When your spike is over, you don't need to continue paying for server/bandwidth/power that you don't need to, and it's easy to add more if you see your usage getting really high.
Another option is a host like Slicehost.
Wikipedia - Cloud computing for more info.