For those interested, I added a yc feature request for a section dedicated to hosting a few days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341 I think it would be nice if we could discuss vendors, prices, levels of service, and other pros/cons. For example, the ability to handle traffic spikes is something everyone wants, but I'd rather hear about it from a customer than a from claim on the vendor's website...

If anything, I think this story just illustrates the importance of using small pages which don't require database hits. I've weathered several slashdottings, and my server has hardly blinked -- because the pages which slashdot has directed people towards have been static HTML, and it's easy to serve a 20kB HTML file to hundreds of visitors per second.

Complexity is the enemy of stability -- the more complicated your web site is, the more fragile it will be. For a web site which is always available, keep things as simple as possible.

"Complexity is the enemy of stability..." -- absolutely agree here, and my most difficult decisions have been choosing between those two vars. I guess the problem is how do you build a useful and innovative system and still keep it simple?