A $5 VPS, with almost any app, can handle the front page of hacker news. If I remember correctly I'd even venture to say hacker news runs on a one or two core box. It should be the standard
back
2 comments
Hacker News might not be the best example, as it seems to get overloaded once every week or two, usually when a contentious/high volume topic comes up.
And despite that, hackernews is as popular as ever. I think the moral of this story is that having some downtime isn't a big deal.
My impression is that your standard wordpress + Apache + mod_php + mysql on same server install cannot, without plugins that improve wordpress' caching behaviour, and that's a large portion of the sites that do fall over.