The Jekyll recommendation is a great one. For quick one-off articles something like pen.io is great, as well. And GitHub Pages are just fantastic if you didn't know already :)

In my experience, MediaTemple handles traffic spikes remarkably well. Maybe not ideal for the super-techies, but running WordPress on it with a caching plugin handles traffic pretty well at the $20 / month plan. And using S3 to serve static sites is fantastic. I'm on my phone right now so it's a pain to find the specific article, but Kyle Shank uses S3 and wrote a pretty handy article at http://kyleshank.com. Check it out and try to find the article. Great read.