The link got about 13000 hits so far, thereof about 5000 hits with a referrer value containing "ycombinator". But as only 3481 hits occured during the 3 days before it was posted on HN, I guess that actually about 9000 hits are due to HN.

I think the hardware platform is not really interesting, as the DDOS was only caused by the worker pool of Apache2 being too small. Each hit of the site creates about 30 additional request for css,js,png and gif files. So 9000 hits in 3h mean something like 270.000 requests in 3h. Apparently this was too much for 50 workers.