@julia@eepy.moe In a previous life, I ran a then-highly-current niche news site that briefly popped into the Alexa "top 100 most popular domains on the web" list (when that still existed...), alongside the big names you've definitely heard of. For a while it was the canonical news source for that topic for pretty much every journalist, and many linked back.

It was a pile of hastily put-together garbage PHP on a $5/month VPS running lighttpd, with 512MB, *maybe* 1GB of RAM? It had some incredibly rudimentary and generic caching. It got a bit slow but never broke. Although the web in general had way less users back then, it absolutely was under high load.

I continue to be baffled by how some people seem to think that you just *need* a whole fucking Kubernetes cluster of dedicated hardware to serve a couple of a hits a second. I promise that you only need a tiny fragment of that hardware if you do literally any optimization at all and don't expect sub-ms response times.