The HN effect is overrated. I had two articles on the front page at the same time and never exceeded 1000 requests per minute. And very very few of those visits turn into repeat users.

Edit: (The load was easily handled by a single Heroku dyno. I turned it up to two dynos overnight, just in case, but it turned out to be unnecessary.)

Not being able to deal with low quality traffic spikes is one of those things that engineers see as a failure, but aren’t necessarily so from a business perspective when compared with the potential cost of a scalable infrastructure.

Not that all spikes are low quality, or even that one on HN ones are. I reckon for some products they are.