Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always confused me. What is going on when someone's site is taken down by HN traffic? (Maybe the fact it's on HN when this occurs is just coincidence: maybe the real traffic loads are always from reddit or twitter or something in these cases?) (My experience with high-ranking HN posts: initially with DreamHost, later with cheapest AWS ec2—never a noticeable impact with either)
Among articles you see on the front page, there is a two orders of magnitude difference in visits between the more popular and the less popular. HN/reddit/twitter/android can all send a similar amount of traffic. There's one order of magnitude there, how many places an article is featured at the same time? Then there's an order of magnitude within each place, how much interest and readership the article could gather?…
I also haven’t had the number one spot on HN (except maybe briefly), but was in 2 and 3 for long stretches and even an order of magnitude more traffic wouldn’t have been a problem.
Two orders probably would have been, but I have a hard time imagining a 100x traffic difference between the 1 spot and the 2 spot. Then again, if it was a very slow day here vs a very busy day maybe (though in my case it wasn’t a very slow day).