Faith the Dog's Official Web Site is a Drupal 6 site using the Acquia distro (but without an Acquia subscription). The site is integrated with Twitter and uses Gigya Socialize for user authentication.
On Dec. 16, 2009 the Associated Press published a news story titled Two-legged dog gives hope to disabled Army vets and a YouTube video about Faith
The story was picked up by many regional papers/web sites, MSNBC, Yahoo! News top item, Google News, Huffington Post etc etc There was also a flurry of activity on Twitter and Facebook
As a result, traffic that was previously 300-500 visits per day spiked to over 7300 on 12/16 alone, and the site hosted at Hot Drupal held up pretty well, with some minimal performance caching turned on.
On 12/17, there were 5000 visits by 9AM. I asked my server admin if I should do anything besides Throttle, Boost and caching, and I got a call from Steve in a panic about the video and mp3 files. Hot Drupal set them up on a CDN server for no extra charge. I made a mistake adding the 301 redirects in .htaccess by hand, then Steve from Hot Drupal said "Why don't you click on the Redirect button in cPanel like I do?" DOH! I upgraded my plan for the increased bandwidth anyway. The day finished with 22280 visits.
Some day I will get around to writing a proper case study. I developed the site as a volunteer because I am in love with Faith. I have not been successful engaging a volunteer designer, the web site uses a very slightly modified Ability theme. I have sort of been waiting for the FTD site to "grow up" - this may well be her "coming of age."