I never got 10K from Hacker News alone, but on my blog I got 10K from HN combined with Reddit, with the links being submitted at aprox. the same time, for 3 articles I wrote.
My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it didn't even blink.
Seeing how people are talking about caching, load-balancing, clusters, beefy servers and so on, just makes me think how extremely awful and bloated Wordpress is.
