I had a blog story running on the front of HN for a couple of hours and my EC2 micro instance just died under the load. Since I didn't expected to have such amount of traffic in the first place, my WordPress installation wasn't optimized at all.

I have learn in the process and now I think my blog can handle way more rps even on a micro instance. Thanks to nginx. I have blogged about this a couple weeks ago:

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...

One of the next step would be to use nginx load balancing (upstreaming) feature but I bet I won't get that popular :-)