In 99.9% of cases, a $5 VPS would have been able to handle the Reddit/HN traffic, if only it were configured better. If you "yum/apt-get install httpd" and call

In 99.9% of cases, a $5 VPS would have been able to handle the Reddit/HN traffic, if only it were configured better. If you "yum/apt-get install httpd" and call it a day, your default configuration will cause Apache to spawn more processes than there is available memory as soon as you get more than a few visits at once, and the disk swapping will kill the box. If you set reasonable limits for the number of processes/threads/connections to keep them within the available RAM, then most sites will have no issue with thousands of visitors per hour. Here's a screenshot of the real-time analytics for my blog on a day it was front page of HN. That was a WordPress site, with no caching, on Linode's 512MB VPS (the cheapest plan). The server barely registered any load at all. http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-content/themes/2012/hnpulse.png http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-content/themes/2012/hnpulse.p... I also launched my web analytics startup on a VPS. It was handling millions of visits per day before I rented the first real server. You can absolutely have thousands of users, thousands of dollars in revenue, and a $20 hosting bill. Sometimes that's all that's required. Plan for what you're going to do when you outgrow the hosting, but there's no need to buy hardware you don't need up front.