[grx]

Why is website down

[kensai]

It has probably been "slashdotted" (in our time: hackernewsed). :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

[kmod]

Something in my server's configuration eats more and more memory, until the OOM killer decides that killing the MySQL database looks like a dandy way to reclaim memory.

[poooogles]

Try Varnish, for stuff like this it's pretty perfect.

[max_]

Too much traffic from HN, the database(probably SQL) could not make as many concurrent connections. Hence the scaling problem.