I had some blog posts on the front page a couple years ago. My blog is an unmodified WordPress install on the smallest Linode (at the time, that was 512MB RAM).

I had some blog posts on the front page a couple years ago. My blog is an unmodified WordPress install on the smallest Linode (at the time, that was 512MB RAM). No caching plugins or CDN, every page was served live from the database. Got >20K visits over the course of a few hours, 800+ active concurrent visits according to live web stats. It didn't cause any problems, load wasn't even high. All you need is a sane nginx/apache configuration.