[re-thc]

> and if your web server software can’t cope with that, it’s bad.

Well then sites on average are sadly "bad" by your standards. Lots of sites that get on the front page of HN go down.

[chrismorgan]

There are a lot of bad sites, but it’s nowhere near average—it’s a small fraction that are bad in these ways. I visit many sites from HN, and encounter pages that are down or even struggling due to overtraffic significantly less than once a week. Admittedly most of the pages loaded are on well-established sites or static hosts, but there are plenty that are WordPress or similar.