I think the most prototypical "hugged to death" personal website is a stock wordpress setup on shared hosting or a low spec vm, without any caching plugins, and

I think the most prototypical "hugged to death" personal website is a stock wordpress setup on shared hosting or a low spec vm, without any caching plugins, and perhaps with some popular plugins that happen to be database heavy. It's easy to click a few buttons, install some plugins and themes, and wind up running 100+ sql queries on every page load. The various caching plugins work very well, but it's not necessarily something everyone thinks of turning on in advance of getting a lot of traffic all at once. Can't say if that's what happened here, but it's super common when personal sites linked here go down.