You are underestimating HN's reach, this happens all the time. As someone who has been on the front page of HN it's a pretty big rush in traffic!

I'd wager that the load is amplified by other sites that treat HN as a goldmine of tasty links.

Hacker news doesn't generate much traffic, despite what people are saying.

The host here has a limit of 160000 files served each day. That is extremely low. If the site has an icon, css, a js file and a few images it's 10 files each visit. That's will limit it to 16k visits/day. If there are more files loaded it might just handle a few thousand visits, and they have received more than that from HN now.

Well, if every asset request hits the origin (no CDN, no caching...) that would be a misconfiguration of the website. It should never happen for a blog.

A decade ago I was on the front page and saw ~16k uniques/hour I think?

Wait really? I'm not really sure what to think and I posted before I saw this... I wonder why the limit is so low?

Yeah, it's hard to tell thb, just a guess. But potentially the site also misconfigured their server, causing too much cache misses and hitting the server direclty.

The HN hug of death is real. If you aren’t prepared, it can set fire to your server room.

Oldtimers 'round these parts call it "slashdotted"