How much traffic is required to be considered slashdotted these days when running a simple blog?
Tangenting away from the OP, but curious because I'm getting into setting up and running my own web server for the first time, and while I don't expect to be slashdotted, it's something I'd like to prepare for.
My site didn't even top 5% of its resources when it was on the front page of HN, Reddit, Kotaku, Destructoid, Eurogamer, The Informer, Slashdot, etc all at the same time. (Well okay, Slashdot four days later.)
You don't need Node, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL, Wordpress, etc to serve up a simple text blog that you post on once a week. If you put all of that on a $5/mo VPS, it's not going to handle any kind of serious load.
We're mostly all developers here. It's not even a weekend project to set up a simple blog from scratch.
Host your site on nginx, don't include a bunch of massive Javascript libraries, serve your content statically or without using a dynamic scripting language, and you'll be fine.
One thing I'm not certain of - I recall there was a significant overhead to running a site on SSL vs plain HTTP (mostly due to key negotiation - the initial session setup). That overhead is still there (even if running something with http2 support, like caddy[2] should help a bit). What I'm not sure about, is how much CPU time a typical $5/mo VPS has compared to the dedicated webserver I managed to run into the ground due to a miscommunication that led to a https-link being sent to media outlets rather than the http-link (the server wasn't really specced to do https). This was around 2005 though, and the server was already a bit long in the tooth.
I'm not going to say my design is maximally efficient, because it definitely isn't. It's just that 'modern' dev creates sites that are orders of magnitude more expensive to construct pages with. That stuff works for major corporations with data centers. It doesn't work so much when you're one of 256 instances on a single blade server inside a single data center hosting 20,000+ servers.
Also, when it comes to HTTPS, my site also uses that. HTTP redirects to HTTPS, and the TLS used is very strong 256-bit ECC.
The biggest cost to crypto is definitely for people living overseas from the server location. The added round-trip inherent in TLS v1.2 and below slows things down for international visitors. But ... I kind of lost it when my own ISP started injecting falsified HTTP responses to redirect me to their "maintenance notifications." I don't have the luxury of switching ISPs, so instead I'm moving everything possible to HTTPS.