No our sites do not get hit with millions of bots. But there are large amounts of users. I suspect with this site they went live to help find the bugs and get a sense of how much hardware they would need to ramp up to full operation. In doing so they were probably a bit overwhelmed and it was more than they expected.

It's a balance. Throw hardware at bad code (happens way more than people realize) or spend the time to develop good code. The latter takes time and skill that may or may not be available to them.