If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them.

Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

Here's an example from a couple of months back when I received too much traffic from HN on my wordpress install and it made the server explode: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2243

It went up to 133 simultaneous visitors and then... poof!

After that I installed a Cache plugin, and since then I've had a couple of articles hitting HN again and going over 200 simultaneous visits with the CPU remaining at low levels. So yeah, Wordpress can scale, with the right plugins :)

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

If your blog is getting 50 daily visitors, congratulations.

Really ? That's kind of low, though. I would have thought most blogs get at least a couple of hundred visits (and not bots) every day.

I had a "wordpress as default" blog hosted at DreamHost and it handled up to 1.000 visits a day without crashing. More than that, and DreamHost turned it off to prevent it to impact other users.

Now it lives in a Digital Ocean's $20 VPS, fine tuned to serve WordPress and with W3 Total Cache plugin. Blitz.io tests say it could handle 80 million pages served a day. I know that's not really true, but it handles 60.000-80.000 real visits (more than 100k pages) every month without problems.

Assuming millions will read your articles yes.