I need a server that can handle 8000 or more people refresh a simple HTML page (20K file) every 40 second.

My current VPS account cant even handle 600 users. What limits a server? is it the cpu or memory? loading a html page should not put much load on CPU!

17,280,000 hits a day
345gb a day

That's quite a load...

Indeed get ready to fork out some major dollars.

mod_gzip with static html will drop your bandwidth to around 1/5 of the number robdavy gave you with no extra cpu cost.

I think a mid-level server would handle the load.

I think a Dual Xeon 3.06 or Dual Opteron 242+ with 2+ GB ECC Ram and SCSI HDs would handle it. Might also wanna invest in Zeus instead of Apache.

I'd vote Dual Opteron with a nice raid SCSI setup.

Should be sufficient.

the traffic rush is only for 2 hours during the game. After that traffic drops to 30 to 100 visitors at any time.

since I only need the server for 2 to 4 hours per month is it possible to rent it for a day or two instead of leasing it!

Is there a provider that offers high end server for a very short duration?

I don't know of anywhere that will allow you to lease a server for a couple of hours a month. It just wouldn't be worth it to the provider since they would have to either

A. Keep that server reservered for your use every month
B. Reset up a new server for you every month
C. If some one DOES do one of the above options, you'll be paying full price more than likely..

may be some one who has a fast server can rent me a spot for 2 hours per month! In terms of bandwidth it wont use more than 10 or 20 GB in entire month!

Set up thttpd and you can probably serve that from a low-end P4.

200 requests a second is not that huge, especially if it's static, and especially if it's the same file everyone wants. It'll get cached in RAM and responses will take fractions of a second.