I think you're making the same point I was when I asked the OP how much traffic she/he actually thinks will originate from being featured on one of these sites.

I think you're making the same point I was when I asked the OP how much traffic she/he actually thinks will originate from being featured on one of these sites. You'd be lucky to get 100,000 requests. Still, assuming there would be disagreement about that, I wanted to be generous with the number to show that even if we're extremely liberal with total daily traffic, we still are dealing with extremely small sustained load per second and small burst traffic. As I said earlier, because we've all seen sites knocked offline by this kind of media attention, there is a widespread belief that the traffic in question is huge. It is not. Rather, the traffic some sites see as a result of being featured in this way is simply the first time they've been tested with any sort of concurrent usage. If during its development, the application was only ever been tested by a few users, it might not have been designed or deployed all that well.