I had top comment on pg's most recent essay; I got an extra 1,500 visitors to a subreddit I mentioned in the comment.

And my comment only rose to the top when the essay was quite far down the frontpage.

The link in this post was top or near top at the time this essay was #1, so I imagine they got quite a few visitors quite fast.

We don't have a dedicated server set up (We got one yesterday but its been having technical issues). Had to disable some features that were requiring too much. I honestly wasn't expecting this much traffic this quickly. I guessed wrong :P