The traffic isn't even that high. It boggles my mind any time a website cannot handle it.

I always wondered. How did we manage to run anything lets say 20 years ago. We should have multiple times more memory, cpu, bandwidth available... Or are we just that many magnitudes more inefficient?

Yes, it is magnitudes more inefficient, with large JS payloads, slow APIs, and underpowered cloud hosts.

Websites often went down under load 20 years ago too but people were far more quick to think it was their own connection on the blink.

Yes, sites were much better engineered too, with smaller and less rich and less dynamic payloads, but don't count out a change in expectations along with it.

How much traffic could that be? Given the number of comments on this page, I can't imagine it being more than a few thousand clicks? So why would any site go down?

According to Cloudflare, the site has had around 30k unique visitors in just the first 3 hours since the link was posted here.

It's my site, yes. It's on a VPS which usually has far more resources than required. I really wasn't expecting to get everyone's attention.

That's much more than I expected, to be honest. I guess most people are lurking.

The amount of traffic a website can handle is a function of cost not experience.

Don't understand this at all. If you have a static site (Which a blog should be), CDNs will allow you to handle practically unlimited traffic for free.

The blog is using cloudflare and it is very easy to setup caching rules to optimize the site.

Sadly I have been noticing non optimized sites at lot more now.

attempting to reduce X to “just a function of cost” will almost always “work” - if one assumes themselves experienced enough to know how to spend hypothetical dollars.

the amount of traffic a website can handle is impacted by both. with insufficient experience, website won’t scale, money won’t be spent.

There are a bunch of tradeoffs--cost, cost predictability, control, redundancy, flexibility, etc. Money isn't a magic wand as you say and, honestly, I'm not sure how much extra I would pay in general on the off-chance that a blog post might go viral every 10 years--if that is indeed the tradeoff.

Lol no.

The cost to host a blob of text on the internet is ~0. Not being able to serve a handful of HN requests is 100% about effort and experience.

So he's cheap. I actually ICANN Lookup'ed his domain and it's registered with NAMECHEAP, so like, he even buys services that have cheap in the name.

It's definitely a function of expertise. You could get a free host that could totally handle the hug of death. You could know how to deploy a static website more efficiently.

Sometimes people like to experiment on their personal / side projects.

Me too. But I don't claim to be an authority on web internals.