I had basically the same experience a few years ago when the Wikileaks stuff was first released and I hacked together a basic search engine for it. Interestingl

I had basically the same experience a few years ago when the Wikileaks stuff was first released and I hacked together a basic search engine for it. Interestingly, I got most traffic through Twitter which I hardly ever use personally. Anyway, that was an EC2 Micro running PHP-FPM on Nginx, and it stayed up without problems through millions of hits over a few days as well. It's easy to write a well-scaling single-function site like that. Yet a lot of blogs and more complex sites die instantly when they cross a couple of dozen hits per second. I suspect there are multiple reasons for it, but the most egregious one coming to mind is the typical PHP setup within shared hosting environments where every single request means about 30 file compilations and a lot of DB requests. Caching is probably not very popular either.