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The high traffic to the blog post has brought their entire site down.

It's always a good idea to host the blog separately from the site - best is to use a managed solution (tumblr, wordpress.com, etc..)

It might not have been the author submitting the site

True, though in this case it was.

So uh, what is the question?

How do you know how much traffic you will get?

I have no idea how many people visit HN and how many click on any given link in what space of time.

Maybe PG or someone can give some guidance?

If you can't handle a couple of 1000 hits in a short time period... does wordpress still default to not having any caching solutions at all out of the box?

I saw a load of about 200-250 simultaneous visitors when one of my sites got posted from ycombinator to the reddit. After 12 hours it tapered off.

There's no excuse for failing under that kind of load serving what is essentially a small, static text document.