Ask HN: Your advice for a high peak-traffic website

Hi all,

If I'm building a PHP website which is expected to withstand some big peaks in traffic (think big publication articles or a popular link on HN), what are the key things to pay attention to? Will a normal website be ok? Do I use a framework with caching on shared hosting? Or is it all about getting it on something like Amazon S3 and not really caring about the code?

Our main fear is the site shutting down at a point of peak traffic.

Some basic background: The site will be serving about 1000 rows of data from a MySQL database but there isn't a priority for this data to be real-time. No e-comm or anything clever - just listings and profiles.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Ali