This is almost purely a matter of what software you're running. Just about any server can handle HN traffic if it's serving static content using a event-based s

This is almost purely a matter of what software you're running. Just about any server can handle HN traffic if it's serving static content using a event-based server like nginx. Oh the other end, if you have a dynamic web site that's doing heavy DB queries on every request, even a relatively small rate of requests can bring you down. A basic scaling strategy is pretty straight forward. 1) Any content that can be static should be, and most content can be static. For example you can make Wordpress serve posts as static files using plugins. 2) Any dynamic content should rely heavily on caching (DB queries in memcached and HTML content in Varnish, for example).