Ask HN: Is preparing for the slashdot effect even necessary?

I'm writing on some articles I wanted to publish on a blog. Additionaly that site will act as my portfolio. Nothing fancy, a lot of those are out there and a lot of those never get many hits.

I often come across blogs with interesting articles linked here, on reddit or similar. By the time I try to visit them they are often overloaded and I can't help myself and think "It can't be that hard...".

I have a small vps (the $5 digital ocean one) which isn't doing much most of the time. It handles mail, sometimes runs my code and I thought about setting up a teamspeak server. Because the blog will be static anyway my inital choice was S3, but having trouble getting a credit card and the only other option beeing to get a prepaid card I wondered if it's worth the hazzle. And hosting analytics or even a non-static site would be possible with no additional cost if I chose to use the vps instead.

I assume such a machine can't handle more than 1000 requests per second (or probably a quarter of that with heavy frameworks), but that's still such a large number.

I wonder if that is enough to "stay alive" even if someone decided to find one of my articles to be worthy of HN/reddit/e.g.