A few years ago, I was running a bunch of WordPress sites on a FreeBSD 8 VPS with only a single-core and 768 MB of RAM. I'm not sure who linked to it first but

A few years ago, I was running a bunch of WordPress sites on a FreeBSD 8 VPS with only a single-core and 768 MB of RAM. I'm not sure who linked to it first but a page on one of the sites ended up getting linked to by Reddit, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and I forget who else. Fortunately, I was running nginx and one of the WordPress caching plugins (W3 Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, I forget which) and had spent a fair amount of time trying to tune the whole setup. The VPS managed to serve ~200k visitors over a period of a few hours without any issues whatsoever. I was pretty amazed since this particular page has a LOT of images (Pingdom's Website test for the page reports 158 requests and 1.4 MB in size). Nowadays, I run nginx and varnish on a physical server with four 2.2 GHz cores and 16 GB of RAM. It definitely doesn't have any problems keeping up. After the snapchatdb.info site got shut down by their provider, I hosted it for them and served up ~30 TB over a few days.