The page size is just shy of 3kb. At 350k hits, that's around 1gb of data transfer. If he had 100 requests in one second (average is 8/ps over 12 hours), that

The page size is just shy of 3kb. At 350k hits, that's around 1gb of data transfer. If he had 100 requests in one second (average is 8/ps over 12 hours), that's 300kb per second transfer rate. 1gb of data transfer for a single day is relatively small. Server upload rates of <1mbps is also small. If we make the page 100kb in size now, for example with a few nice images 350k hits turns to 34gb of data transfer. 100 requests in one second would require a 10mbps transfer rate. A $15p/m host likely wouldn't be able to cope with this. > I think the combination of Lighttpd+php5-fpm is underappreciated... So for me the real reason the site stayed up was not because he picked PHP or any other technology, but because the page was barebones and didn't put any strain on the server at all. Page file size is an underappreciated advantage for websites!