I've handled being Slashdotted back when being Slashdotted was still a thing. Yeah, thanks, I'm ancient. Before I fart myself to sleep reminiscing the good old

I've handled being Slashdotted back when being Slashdotted was still a thing. Yeah, thanks, I'm ancient. Before I fart myself to sleep reminiscing the good old days, we got ~10k visits in a hour, on a ASP.NET website (admittedly with good caching) but on the absolute dirt-cheapest of shared hosting. It didn't skip a beat. I've done similar with PHP and Django. As long as you can avoid hitting the database every request, you can scale to the moon with very little work. Hugo is static. Your toaster should be able to support 5k users.