Well ... actually we can. The web server configuration has been changed to handle this amount of requests and it is working pretty good right now. :) We did not really anticipate that much traffic, as it is far more than what we usually see. So the web server was not configured for such a situation and ran out of workers to handle the requests.

Creating a static site at first was just a much faster and safer solution, especially as the original site did not contain anything apart from the two lines of text.