Surviving the Front Page of HN for Noobs

Surviving several thousand pageviews compressed into a few hours is really not a feat. Not surviving them is also not newsworthy. Getting on the front page of HN, or before that Reddit, Digg, Slashdot etc, is awesome but in almost no cases does it warrant a "how I did it or how I survived it" post unless there's actually something remarkable about your setup or whatever trick you did to get there.

I don't think a load balancer is really necessary. I weathered being front-paged on HN for several hours just fine using a 512 Linode VPS. It was a pretty stock-vanilla nginx + PHP-FastCGI + mySQL server. Hardly broke a sweat.

I think you should probably look into the configuration of your server, rather than throwing more hardware at the problem.

You're right, it's probably not that newsworthy. I decided to put it together cause:

1. I spent all day dealing with it, so it seemed significant at least to me

2. Most of the sites that make the front page are large hosted sites with a dedicated IT team, so the case of a small site making it seemed like a somewhat interesting hosting challenge