I swear we are getting too damn smart for our own good. What's wrong with a 205 Reset Content error code? Or a 503 Service Unavailable code? Yes, some users will bounce and never come back to check your page, but who cares if you are getting 1000x or 10000x the baseline visitors.

You severely underestimate how much traffic can a static blog on a VPS running nginx can serve.

A $5 server can easily handle being Slashdotted or HN'd.