The viral moment is the best and worst thing that can happen to campaign infrastructure. Best, because it is the cheapest acquisition you will ever get. Worst, because it arrives without warning, at the scale of the entire news cycle, aimed squarely at your slowest page.
Our answer is boring on purpose: static-first pages served from the edge, a donation flow that renders without a database query, and graceful degradation for everything that is not the ask. If the dashboard slows down at 10pm, nobody notices. If the donate button does, the moment is gone.
"If your donate page needs a database query to render, you have already lost the viral moment."
We load-test every launch at 40x projected peak, because the spike we plan for is never the one that arrives. The clip drops, the traffic lands, and the site does the least interesting thing possible: it just works.