My total hits on / of when PDFy hit the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034431), and remained there for some 24 hours, iirc:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "news.ycombinator.com" | wc -l
    19387

That said, the Hacker News post led to a bunch of other places writing about it a day or so later, the most notable of which was Gigazine:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET / " | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
    544

But most of their traffic came from the document viewer they embedded in their article:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# cat access.log | grep "GET /d/C8gHjDOxTLdunq1a/embed" | grep "gigazine.net" | wc -l
    41609

And this is what the bandwidth usage looked like during those few days:

    root@debian:/var/log/lighttpd/pdf.cryto.net# vnstat -d

    eth0  /  daily

         day         rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
     ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
      [...]
      07/13/14    767.19 MiB |  949.01 MiB |    1.68 GiB |  162.72 kbit/s
      07/14/14      1.27 GiB |    9.13 GiB |   10.40 GiB |    1.01 Mbit/s
      07/15/14      7.05 GiB |  106.73 GiB |  113.79 GiB |   11.05 Mbit/s
      07/16/14      2.89 GiB |   48.73 GiB |   51.62 GiB |    5.01 Mbit/s
      07/17/14      2.22 GiB |   24.21 GiB |   26.43 GiB |    2.57 Mbit/s
      07/18/14      1.23 GiB |   11.90 GiB |   13.13 GiB |    1.27 Mbit/s
      07/19/14      1.31 GiB |   11.88 GiB |   13.19 GiB |    1.28 Mbit/s
      07/20/14      1.38 GiB |    7.73 GiB |    9.11 GiB |  884.50 kbit/s
      07/21/14      1.44 GiB |    9.55 GiB |   10.99 GiB |    1.07 Mbit/s
      [...]

If I recall correctly, my HTTPd was hit with some 50-100 reqs/sec total (for static + dynamic). It didn't really have any issues with it, despite running on a cheap VPS with 512MB of RAM, on a non-optimal stack (lighttpd + PHP + MySQL).

I've noticed a significant increase of recurring traffic since (it still hovers at about 5-15GB of traffic a day as opposed to the 2GB before, and there's a steady stream of uploads).

As long as you don't run something obscenely heavy like WordPress or Joomla, and you don't use Apache, you'll probably be fine.