Depends. 50k hits in 3 hours is 5 hits a second. I could serve more than 10 hits a second on the first web server I ever set up, in 1994, on an SGI Indigo 2 with maybe a 250MHz CPU and 256 megabytes of RAM, using NCSA httpd, which spawned a new process for every hit. Under IRIX. While I was using it as a workstation. Also, doing a reverse DNS lookup for every hit for the access log.

My current home page, http://canonical.org/~kragen/, benchmarks at 4000 requests per second with ab on localhost. That's roughly a thousand times the load you were under. This is not because our server is a thousand times faster than yours. (It's a dual-core 2.4GHz Celeron, running Apache.) This is because your server is doing a thousand times as much work as it needs to in order to serve that page.