you know people always talk about "our site was not ready for TC", but has anyone ever posted what kind of infrastructure you actually need to be ready for all that traffic?
I think there's a lot of steps you can take to get the most out of the press you get from a launch. I think it's one of the easiest ways to get press.
I've been TC'd once before, and it hit us at the worst possible time- a temporary banner was up for the hours before launch. That banner got more attention in the article than the service. The site held up fine, but >80% of the traffic was wasted. I think this is a pretty common phenomena.
If you can do 50 reqs/second you will be absolutely fine; it doesn't take any kind of special server.
We get more traffic now on a regular Monday morning than TechCrunch ever sent us. Their influence is greatly overstated.
But doesn't being TechCrunch'd help your googleability/google page rank?