[alexeston]

I would really, sincerely, love to reply with my opinion on this, what seems by the title at least, wonderful article. But unfortunately people do not seem to have decent enough of a hosting provider and/or server to survive the outcome of getting on the front page of HN and hence I am forced to see "Error establishing a database connection".

[frozenport]

Back in the old days before VPS, websites would autoscale leading to huge and unprecedented bills. For example, I hosted a website that contained download links. One day the Chinese found out and hot-linking causing my server bill to jump from $5.95 to over $200. I was 12 and this made me sad.

[alexeston]

I believe I was not around then. I started when the shared hosting was a really popular thing with fixed bandwidth and even that could of easily survived HN. So, I'm kind of amazed on why some sites can't handle that in 2013.

[frozenport]

When you exceed your limit they charge you a penalty.

[alexeston]

Yes, but at least here in Estonia the limit was more than enough (usually 500gb of bandwidth per month).