Well ... actually we can. The web server configuration has been changed to handle this amount of requests and it is working pretty good right now. :) We did not really anticipate that much traffic, as it is far more than what we usually see. So the web server was not configured for such a situation and ran out of workers to handle the requests.

Creating a static site at first was just a much faster and safer solution, especially as the original site did not contain anything apart from the two lines of text.

I too thought there were only a few (thousand) HNers, but yesterday I learned how wrong I was.

Yesterday I submitted a link (an StackOverflow question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3943556) that got 107 up-votes on HN, but the number of unique visitors went from below 5000 to 25000 (in other words, 20000 unique (based on IP) visitors clicked on my link).

I studied medicine at the TUM and its sister university, the LMU (The schools teach their med students together for the first two years). Their site would reliably go down every third Friday evening, when the anatomy exam results were posted - meaning they couldn't even handle the minor and expected spike of 600 students downloading a smallish PDF.

I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?)

if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a lot of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen much traffic, ever.

To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the story.

German universities are financed by the states. You probably won't find many good operations people or programmers working for that little money.