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It might help to mention the stack you're on, as well as your current hosting setup. Maybe someone can help you by letting you borrow a few servers, or help you tweak things.

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EC2 small instance at the moment. I can afford to upgrade that for a while but I don't have the time to do it this second, I will be doing tomorrow though!

It's all on a LAMP stack.

See if you can cache pages that don't change too often. If you don't have the time to setup Varnish or similar at least try to cache to /tmp/

Feel free to contact me (email in profile) if you need guidance or setup help

Thanks for the offer of help - I think I've mitigated the worse with a minor functional change now. If it gets nasty again I'll definitely be in touch :)

Might want to upgrade from the small instance sooner than that, the site seems completely unresponsive right now.

I know :( if i could this second I would but I have guests arriving for the weekend, it's terrible timing really!

I may have controlled it a bit by replacing the "random" link with a specific flight instead. Looks like that was causing most of the problems - keeping an eye on it.

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