[paulitex]

Another great solution that doesn't involved changing anything in how you run your blog (or even moving off of Dreamhost), is a front-end cache like http://www.fastly.com/.

It's really affordable for personal sites, and for static sites like yours you'll be getting 98%+ cache hits – almost no traffic will ever hit your Dreamhost box, it will all come from their highly optimized Varnish caches around the world.

Learndot's blog is hosted on a ec2 small instance fronted by fastly, our launch article was on HN/Techcrunch/etc... simultenously and we never went over 10% cpu.

tl;dr: Use fastly.

[graue]

Wouldn't CloudFlare's free plan be just as good here?

Edit: Looks like Danielle thinks so... she signed up with them a few hours ago. https://twitter.com/DanielleMorrill/status/28918229241967411...

[dmor]

Yes, actually I have been a CloudFlare user for awhile but had paused it on my blog while dealing with a vulnerability. By the time traffic spiked and I turned it back on there was no way to reach the site to cache a copy. I also use the paid version for the Referly site and blog, and love it.

[chacham15]

$50 a month is expensive for a personal blog...

[StavrosK]

I have had the same (well, better) results using Varnish. It's free, too.

TL;DR: Use Varnish.