Not a bad number, I wonder how it compares with a HN hug of death. Sure, caching helps but it's not the whole story (LB, configuring the cache, benchmarking, etc)
thats google analytics. specifically the "live" feature they added to commodify/undercut people who were moving to or splitting their spend with chartbeat (who's main thing was that live-on-site counter).
fwiw, the HN hug of death rarely breaks 5-figures for that metric. Its plenty to destroy a wordpress blog on a two core VPS, but its nothing compared to something getting shared in a large facebook group or trending on twitter. News sites are several orders of magnitude larger than any other type of sites besides the mega-platforms (fb) and comms tools like gmail/slack. Its actually a core part of why the entire sector's business model failed together. Everyone chased "reach" (raw audience size) as their most important revenue generating metric (because it directly factored as higher CPMs). Thats how we wound up with dozens of "news" sites all catering to the exact same 100M people clicking awful headlines in facebook shares and then closing the tab to go back to facebook. They (we) solved for scale, but in a way that turned everyone into a commodified copy of each other with no meaningful connection or relationship to the audience. Then facebook just captured all of the ad revenue by gatekeeping/aggregating/"curating".
Anecdotally, HN is probably ~1/100th of this. The "hug of death" is much more about bad servers and very low usage limits for things like shared hosting plans than it is about the volume of traffic.
Various hugs of death may be correlated. People re-post things found on one service to different ones. You can easily get a Reddit hug on top of HN hug.
Being on the front page of HN (or Reddit for that matter) doesn't bring in as much traffic as you would imagine. It's not insignificant but it's not a deluge like what you are picturing. Turns out most people don't bother to click into the article. They head straight for the comments section. Source: work for a company that has been on the front page of both HN and Reddit on many occasions and have seen the traffic.
Based on my experience, If you are on the front page of HN (top 20) you will get around 1 to 5k visitors in total.
I think every site should be able to handle it.
Reddit brings you less traffic than that. Twitter, Facebook and some Chinese sites can be much more effective.
I only experienced a hug of death once and it was a combination of factors. I had a website on a very particular topic, and this topic made big news (this was unexpected), so I got huge amounts of traffic from every where, (Forums, News sites, social media, and mainly Google searches...). I was down for hours my Apache server just kept dying.
One day later it was already old news and my traffic quickly returned to normal.
Not a bad number, I wonder how it compares with a HN hug of death. Sure, caching helps but it's not the whole story (LB, configuring the cache, benchmarking, etc)
Also what dashboard is that?