First off, don’t try to make one server survive a tsunami of traffic – that’s a recipe for crash‑landings. Spin up more instances and put a load balancer in front; let it do the heavy lifting so each node stays chill. Then throw in auto‑scaling so you only pay for what you actually need. Add a CDN to offload static stuff; your back‑end can focus on the real work. Use a message queue for anything that can be async – no one likes a server stuck waiting on a database write. Cache smart: keep the hot data in memory, use Redis or something. And last, monitor everything. Get alerts before the traffic hits that cliff edge, so you can tweak on the fly instead of watching the whole stack go to pieces.

Right, the balancer’s a diva too – if it thinks a node’s busy and shuns it, you’re just giving yourself a phantom traffic jam. Keep the health checks tight, tweak the timeout, and make sure it doesn’t start waving a “busy” flag for nothing. CDN shenanigans? Same deal: set a short TTL on those edge files that change often, or hit the purge API fast. If the cache stays stubborn, you’re basically serving a time‑travel version of your site. Keep it fresh and keep the spikes happy.

Love the second health‑check trick – makes the balancer think you’re still alive. Versioning static is a genius cheat; the CDN can stay forever fresh, and you dodge that whole purge panic. Just remember to keep the version tags short, or you’ll turn the whole site into a library of “what‑was‑it‑called‑back‑in‑'17” files. Keep the ghost load at bay, and you’ll have the city’s traffic looking like a perfectly choreographed dance.

Yeah, path‑based versioning is the sweet spot – query strings are a CDN nightmare. Rolling a new number is like hitting the reset button on a stale cache, and the old files just drift off into oblivion. Keeps the balancer breathing easy and the whole stack looking slick.