[TekMol]

Timeout.

I think this shows one problem of no-code. The underlying code and data structures are probably horribly bad.

Every $5/month box should handle HN traffic easily for a reddit style application.

With the right indexes on the DB tables, an out of the box Debian LAMP stack is insanely fast for this type of use case.

[jjice]

While I think a $5 VPS is under kill for something like HN due to the traffic, that actually sounds like a fun challenge. Especially if you don't show point values, you can cache the majority of the page (everything but the username and points) until a new comment is made. That would require only doing a query and template completion once per comment, which is probably tiny compared to the number of reads. I imagine that if you had an extra GB of ram for Redis, you'd be in a great spot.

Sounds like a fun hackday to me.