Some weeks ago I submitted a link to an article I wrote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3442640) and I got a lot of views from Hacker News, which made me restart my server several times.<p>It's hosted at Rackspace Cloud Servers.
If you have a WordPress blog, you should use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache or W3 Total Cache. It will drastically reduce the server load and improve the performance significantly.<p>See caching plugins review: <a href="http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-c...</a>
Ditch Wordpress.<p>Did your site make it to the front page?<p>My website made it to #2 on HN front page yesterday : <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521309" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521309</a><p>I logged about 7k visits with ~200 peak concurrent visits. I wouldn't say that's server-stalling level traffic but the thing is my site is hosted on GitHub Pages so it's entirely static.<p>I don't mean to troll, I think there's a Wordpress plugin called supercache or something (google wordpress caching) .<p>But I do want to officially advocate that you rethink whether or not you _really_ need a mysql database, x plugins, and PHP to run a blog
You are better off asking such technical queries at ServerFault.com.<p>Aside, one quick thing I noticed was that you are using Apache. I would recommend that you switch to nginx. You are already handling your comments with Disqus. I would think that generating static pages and handling comments through Disqus is ideal.
Next to use a good caching plugin like W3 Total Cache, you can try CloudFlare. This really reduces your server load, speeds up your website and lowers spam comments on your blog.
nginx + PHP-fastCGI and caching your WordPress is probably the best route. Xcache for PHP if you are feeling frisky. Host your static assets from CloudFront (gzipped CSS/JS/images).
Wordpress is fine so long as you have a decent host. (See not super shared hosting like godaddy dreamhost etc)<p>The main thing you need to do is add caching to wordpress (both w3tc and supercache work fine) and if there is still a problem you are probably on the wrong host and should upgrade to either something like linode or a mediatemple grid server or webfaction basic plan.<p>If you're on a VPS and have caching enabled and still can't manage the traffic I'd say something is wrong with your configuration but just looking at your site I see no caching from either of the plugins I listed.