Yes, that is the smell of geek in the air - welcome slashdot brethren!
I was able to survive the traffic jump even though I'm on a cheap Godaddy hosting account. The reason? Cache!

The reason why many websites crash when bombarded by traffic is because most websites aren't actually "static" - but rather are created on-the-fly from a series of records in a database. In other words, each time you visit the website, you are in fact asking the website to query a database and retrieve some information. Therefore, if too many people visit the website at once, the database receives to many queries, and everything just crashes.

The solution to this problem is a caching layer: a system which detects which web pages are being regularly accessed, and creates a copy of the information requested from the database for these web pages, so the database doesn't have to be called each time a user arrives.

For word press, the software which runs this blog, caching layer is available via this plug in.