(Edit: parent comment sounded as if it didn't think the article deserves to be on frontpage HN. re-reading, I see that I might have misread it: sorry in that case)
In that case, cause-effect is turned around: it went down because it hit the frontpage.
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I've had some of my blogpost hit FP of HN: the traffic spike then is huge; HN feed is widely spread over internet. Hours after FP I started getting referers RSS readers, intranets, reposters etc. Running a static file blog, my €5.00/month shared vps hardly missed a beat with the traffic spike; but it's so big that "going down" is pretty normal for anything "dynamic" I presume.