I've been on the front page of HN a few times, and my site has never gone down due to the hug of death. My setup is a simple low spec VM running under Microsoft Hyper-V on an aging twin Xeon tower server. My site is Apache+PHP on Debian with no SQL backend; the PHP uses templates and flat files. Rock solid, and can really take a hammering.

I'm starting to think that it's time for people to stop using WordPress+MySQL and move over to something more performant.