Rich Miller at the blog Data Center Knowledge — I’m sure you’re all reading it on a daily basis anyway — has a good post about how news web sites are prepping for the onslaught of traffic coming tonight. Three highlights:

– He seems to hint at potential trouble for FiveThirtyEight and other sites “hosted on platforms known primarily for their affordability.” In other words, sites that don’t pay big bucks for hard-core servers and instead rely on free/cheap options like Google’s Blogger.

– Rich points to this real-time graph from Akamai (who sells bandwidth to a lot of news sites), which should track global web traffic minute-by-minute tonight. See if it can break the record set during the ’06 World Cup.

– According to The New York Times, Yahoo actually saw much bigger traffic the day after the 2004 election than the day of: 142 million page views versus 80 million. So if your server avoids meltdown tonight, don’t necessarily think the worst is over.