Yahoo highlights a Reuters article about an article at VirtualTourist.com. A visit to Virtual Tourist suggests it's a good site, worth studying.

It's slow as mud, though ... except the home page, which does come up right away.

I'm going, "what gives?" Then I realize I'm one of about a billion people trying to access it now.

So then I'm going "how can I prevent my site from bogging down if I get a big run of viewers like that?" I'm thinking maybe the content pages I'm linking to from their home page are more processor intensive, or something, so I need to build in a fall-back page structure that displays something without asking a lot of the servers, or something.

Then I realize what might be happening is they do have an enlightened hosting service ... maybe it's standard practice ... that displays the home page as often as it's requested, but slows down other parts of the site to keep within the hosting packages demand limits.