The death hugs I have seen have usually been products that are on shared hosting, which is never a good thing, even when testing an idea. The few that are hosted somewhere like DigitalOcean or Linode, they didn't scale the VM before getting hugged.

Based on the small handful of times a post of mine has hit #5 or higher, you can expect between 20k and 40k visits. How many conversions you get completely depend on your product.

My blog has had 4 posts that have taken top marks. A total of 150k visits (during those days) and I have had 0 newsletter signups, 0 contact form submissions, $0 in advertising revenue, and $0 in attributed business.