OP here: You are right, CloudFlare would have been nice and in retrospect we should have added it. I think it would have fared quite nicely as during all the tests we do on regular basis its doing really well.
yes. That is true. We did not expected the post will get that popular. Unfortunately, it was all done too late. What helped us the most was that blog is hosted on DigitalOcean VPS. We scaled up to the most powerful instance and instantly the blog was back. Kudos to DigitalOcean, it saved our bacon big time today :)
