wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.
Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.
It went up to 133 simultaneous visitors and then... poof!
After that I installed a Cache plugin, and since then I've had a couple of articles hitting HN again and going over 200 simultaneous visits with the CPU remaining at low levels. So yeah, Wordpress can scale, with the right plugins :)
Now it lives in a Digital Ocean's $20 VPS, fine tuned to serve WordPress and with W3 Total Cache plugin. Blitz.io tests say it could handle 80 million pages served a day. I know that's not really true, but it handles 60.000-80.000 real visits (more than 100k pages) every month without problems.