Not the OP, but the thing that springs to mind is to make it resilient to DOS attack and similar. As you say, it didn't crash after the HN spike, but it seems l

Not the OP, but the thing that springs to mind is to make it resilient to DOS attack and similar. As you say, it didn't crash after the HN spike, but it seems likely that a motivated attacker would not have trouble bringing it down. Also the request latency is quite bad, which doesn't bother me a bit for the type of site that it is, but that's solved easily enough since it should be super cacheable.