This has always confused me. What is going on when someone's site is taken down by HN traffic? (Maybe the fact it's on HN when this occurs is just coincidence: maybe the real traffic loads are always from reddit or twitter or something in these cases?)

(My experience with high-ranking HN posts: initially with DreamHost, later with cheapest AWS ec2—never a noticeable impact with either)

Among articles you see on the front page, there is a two orders of magnitude difference in visits between the more popular and the less popular.

HN/reddit/twitter/android can all send a similar amount of traffic. There's one order of magnitude there, how many places an article is featured at the same time?

Then there's an order of magnitude within each place, how much interest and readership the article could gather? Highly variable. The first comment alone can make or break an article.

This sounds off. Both reddit and twitter have the potential for vastly more traffic than HN.

I also haven’t had the number one spot on HN (except maybe briefly), but was in 2 and 3 for long stretches and even an order of magnitude more traffic wouldn’t have been a problem.

Two orders probably would have been, but I have a hard time imagining a 100x traffic difference between the 1 spot and the 2 spot. Then again, if it was a very slow day here vs a very busy day maybe (though in my case it wasn’t a very slow day).

I assume you're targeting reddit programming and similar subs, they're similar to HN in aggregate. You're right that Reddit and twitter have way bigger audience in total but only a fraction of all reddit users is relevant. Assume we're talking about a tech blog, not articles on election or brexit?

It's not about rank. It's about the specifics of the article, mainly the title and the content. It simply attracts more or less readership.

I've had #1 multiple times. I've had articles that stayed on the front page for multiple days.

Wouldn't be surprised if I'm top 1% of personal bloggers on HN or something like that. I'd be shelling out AWS thousands of dollars over the years if I were using anything AWS, or more likely I'd be either broke or the blog would have crumbled under the traffic each time never going viral.

I don’t usually do this but I decided to check your post history. I don’t know if anyone else posted your blog posts to HN but assuming it’s just you, I counted five posts (excluding the flagged ones) that would have made it to the front page of HN for any meaningful amount of time. Based on this, I would say that you are unlikely to be HN’a top blogger.

And I don’t know how you’d set up your blog with AWS but I don’t see how it could be expensive to host static content there.

Wrong assumption, a fair bunch of the posts came from other people :p

I honestly wonder what's the average distribution for HN contributors. I imagine it's not much for personal blogs. Not trying to compare myself to the new york times or cloudflare blog obviously.

Heh. Checked by the domain instead and got 10 submissions with double digit or more vote counts. I still think pg and jacquesm have you beat by quite a bit but yes you have 2x the front page posts I initially spotted.

That's simply not true. I hit #1 a few times with content hosted on S3. Ended up paying maybe extra $2 those months. I'd be worried if I hosted any large files that came with it, but just a blog post? Barely noticeable.

I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't?

The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.

You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.

Cloudflare/Cloudfront, restrict origin IP. Done

This could be an issue (from your site link in a previous comment):

With an ad blocker, this page takes 83 requests to load a total of 2.31 MB.

It's because of images and comments, both of which are critical to a blog. There's one request per image no matter what.

Wordpress is actually really good on that, it's resizing the images automatically for thumbnails and mobiles with caching.