Based on my experience, If you are on the front page of HN (top 20) you will get around 1 to 5k visitors in total. I think every site should be able to handle i

Based on my experience, If you are on the front page of HN (top 20) you will get around 1 to 5k visitors in total. I think every site should be able to handle it. Reddit brings you less traffic than that. Twitter, Facebook and some Chinese sites can be much more effective. I only experienced a hug of death once and it was a combination of factors. I had a website on a very particular topic, and this topic made big news (this was unexpected), so I got huge amounts of traffic from every where, (Forums, News sites, social media, and mainly Google searches...). I was down for hours my Apache server just kept dying. One day later it was already old news and my traffic quickly returned to normal.