Not sure if "have a CDN" advice is as sure as is claimed. My projects site has been #1 on the front page many times, and my dinky little $3/mo VPS had no issues at all in any of those cases.

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mooreds 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm running wordpress on a weak shared server, so it has fallen over in the past.

I think if it was a static site generator (jekyll, hugo, 11ty) then there'd be no issue.

	▲	withinboredom 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is likely because the default MySQL connection limit is only 100 connections and your web server is trying to make more than 100 connections (MySQL is not available error). Then if you are using fpm, the default is just a small worker pool. A cheap server can likely handle thousands of requests, but all the defaults will limit you to under 100.

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marginalia_nu 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Back when I hosted my search engine on a PC out of my apartment, it survived several supposed HN death hugs.

Seems mostly to be a problem where your website is backed by a DBMS, especially when each page impression generates multiple queries. In that scenario, running out of connections probably isn't particularly difficult.

Only time I've actually been knocked offline was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to a blog post I made. That legit drove some real traffic. I'm not sure if it was the filedescriptor ulimit or the number of open connections that killed me, but I did actually blip for a few minutes.