Ask HN: What does the HN hug of death look like?

I had a blogpost about five years ago that got frontpaged on HN. It had about 300 upvotes. Google Analytics reported it got 10,000 uniques, impressions about twice that (some people browsed the about page and other posts of mine). Then there’s people blocking Google Analytics so the actual metric would be much higher. I was lucky I used a CDN both for HTML and images, otherwise it would be hugged to death.

It doesn't take a lot to crash web sites.

I posted a link to a provocative social sciences web site run by a major university and it crashed before the article got to 10 votes but people kept voting it up to 200 or so because they liked the title and presumably the discussion.

I've been thinking about this too. Sorry for hijacking the post but what would it cost, monthly, to have infrastructure capable of dealing with a surge such as a hug of death from HN? Im inexperienced in the area.