I've emailed Patrick, so let's hope he can bring it back up soon.
It's a shame sites can't handle HN-level traffic automatically. My own site got borked when I put it on here without knowing much about web server configurations. Are there some standard practices which one should know?
Basic VPS (on stable provider) + nginx + php-fpm + eaccelerator, barely noticing any kind of traffic spikes (handled SlashDot, HN, HabraHabr, Reddit, Delicious, many others).
Of course it depends on how intensive your app is, but for moderately loaded site - this combination is more than enough. For ex. I've tested Wordpress with this configuration - it can handle nearly 70 mil. hits per day (including into this number hits to images, so probably around 10 mil. actual visitors).
Wouldn't recommend for real-time upgrade (during spike). For real-time go for this: http://gist.github.com/638751 (if load average > 5 - sorry, exit). Crude, cruel, but helped me survive being unexpectedly TechCrunch'd on Apache (didn't know about nginx at the time), then you can finally edit your files, go for caching of nearly everything.
It's a shame sites can't handle HN-level traffic automatically. My own site got borked when I put it on here without knowing much about web server configurations. Are there some standard practices which one should know?