A very quick, small website for responses to a TV tie in will need server capacity to cope with big surges in traffic.

List members pointed out that static pages require far less processing power to serve, so if the site is small, and won't need much updating, it's probably best to go for static html content rather than use a content management system.

“If you can keep the site static then you might be best off just hosting it on Amazon S3 or making use of their CloudFront CDN. I've hosted relatively high traffic sites using both of them. For anything static they take away worries about server uptime, load balancing, etc at a relatively low cost."

“An even cheaper alternative: just host your static content anywhere, and use Cloudflare as a proxy. Its free and it caches static content. It's also what [hacker group] Lulzsec are using to avoid getting their website DDoSed back.”

This article summarises a discussion on the eCampaigning Forum email list. Thanks to everyone who contributed.