Honestly, I never understand the HN hug of death.

Having had sites of mine get to the top of HN multiple times, it's always been around 4 visits per second. (= 15K/hr, or ~100K total over the course of a story.)

Given that things like grabbing something from the database or serving up an image are on the order of a handful of milliseconds... it should be fine.

If HN were sending 1,000 visits per second it would be a totally different story. But it's not. The amount of traffic just isn't that much.