How do you manage Load ?

This question quite often comes up in interviews particularly for a program/project manager kind of role.
The pointy haired interviewer asks
"Supposing you are experiencing uprecedented load on your web server, you have already gone overboard on your project budget, you don't have Devs to work on the problem, you do not have extra hardware, you don't have anything but yourself, your two bare hands, well not quite..just one hand while the other is churning out few reports; to fix the problem, What will you do...?"

The totally confused interviewee, completely bamboozled by the question and at the dismal state of the project almost decides to say.."Thou shalt quite thy gig...." but it is an interview, anything goes..! rather anything that makes the interviewer happy goes.

So the interviewee...collects himself and says "Turn down requests to the server saying....'Why don't you take a coffee break and try again later' "

Pat comes the reply from the Interviewer.." you are hired"

....was remided, when I saw this: