Seriously. If your calendar says 2008 or later, and you’re a metro-market news site, and you can’t handle a wave of traffic from Drudge or Digg or Slashdot or any of the popular linkfarms, you should rethink your server budget.

(Yeah. I know. I should be so lucky.)

UPDATE: I questioned posting this, because I thought it bordered on unfair. But now two hours later, the same article on tampabay.com is still being linked by Drudge and is still making their server swoon. Unsolicited advice: make it a static page for now.

UPDATE 2: As of 12:15 pm, the site appears to be stabilized. Glad they’re back.