I was watching the mars polar lander web set up, in the hope the web
would be able to handle the load. Unfortunately, they haven't gotten
any data for downloading, so we can't tell how well the web sites would
have held up.
On Friday, at landing time, the marslander.jpl.nasa.gov redirector site
seemed to work well. On the other hand, I did get a few error pages
from the www.marspolarlander.com setup. I don't know if the loads on
each site were equivalent.