I'm adding "reliable" into that mix. Too bad they're too expensive and hard to setup for side projects, but HN is probably one of the most stable site I frequently visit, and I don't even think about it.
I disagree that they're expensive. Expensive to own maybe, but you can rent them on a monthly basis from something like Hetzner or OVH for a fraction of the cost of AWS (especially when you include bandwidth which is free and unmetered in this case) and they handle hardware maintenance for you.
Hard to setup is relative. It all depends on what you're doing and how much reliability you need. For a side project or a dev server you can just start with Debian, stick to packaged software (most language runtimes and services such as Postgres or Redis are available) as much as possible and call it a day. You can even enable auto-updates on such a stable distro.
The knowledge you'll gain by dealing with bare-metal is also going to be useful in the cloud even in container environments.
HN definitely gets overloaded at times, including during big outages when everyone stampedes here. I got a bunch of "sorry, we can't serve your request" a little while back.
No; a copy of the HN database is synced regularly to Firebase (https://github.com/HackerNews/API), but IIRC the site itself runs on a single process on a single machine with a standby ready.
My sites run on Cloudflare and Vercel, and I can't even log in to those right now.
I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime...