I do have some hotlinking going on and that doesn't bother me too much. I've monitored that and it has minimal impact on my bandwidth.
But this spike is far too large to be explained by that. I jumped from an average of about 20K hits a day to 135K overnight and nothing in the logs seem to indicate a single source. Like I said, I'm stumped.
To get that kind of spike, I'd have to get linked by Drudge, Yahoo, or MSN. I just can't figure out where the spike came from.
Then most of the hits would have the same referrer.
It's possible you're getting hit by a zombie network, but you're not a big fish, why would anyone care? You make any enemies recently? The behavior is also not consistant. Mostly zombies just send Syns or malformed packets or whatever(too many ways to list) and your ISP is probably handling that at the router level.
I still think someone with an interest in your travels found the page. Did you link to some posts here at FR? Does your ISP statistic reports provide a unique Visitors lists? rather than just hits? One page can be hundreds of hits.
Fan boards can drive many hits. I linked my City of Heroes Movie on the Vault for about 6 hours and had 1000 downloads. At 25mb a pop, I quickly turned it off minus 10GB of my monthy bandwidth. It doesn't take much.