Haha, didn't expect my blog to ever get to the front page of HN and my $5/month DO droplet couldn't keep up. I resized it and now I'm putting Cloudflare in front of it, so hopefully it will stay up now.
You might want to look into caching (either at the wordpress or nginx level). I have a $5 DO and it can handle a good bit of traffic before being hugged to death. Now I do use Ghost as my blogging platform but I haven't enabled anything special in ghost for caching, I did it all in nginx.
Thanks! Yeah, I haven't looked into any sort of performance optimizations. Better late than never, I suppose.
thanks for the very conving article! I've been a facebook and twitter sceptic for some time, but didn't realise it's successors are here!