General question -- would it cost lots of money for this sort of thing never to happen even under times of extreme duress? I assume so.
With enough money? Probably. When spikes like this happen we have to manually alter things like our VM RAM allocation. Ideally we'd be all hip and cool with automatically scaling ec2 images, load balancing front ends (built in some exotic javascript transcompiler), and heavily cached by way of a CDN. Unfortunately we run on an experimental dialect of lisp and don't have any revenue streams yet, so our options are a bit limited.
If you go the way of ads for revenue, please keep them unobtrusive
We've talked a lot about what we would hypothetically want and not want with ads. Unobtrusive is high on the list. That list is so long that I think we're a long way off from doing ads. Our highest priority isn't money though...or even growth. It's to give people a place online where they can escape the vitriol of comment sections, the low-fi content overwhelming reddit, and engage in thoughtful and civil discussions.