He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any

He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic. At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily. People underestimate what good caching can give you. I had an application that would only be able to handle 20/req/second without caching. With aggressive caching, it could handle 2100/req/second so long as that was all reads; and that was true. It handled 40,000 people a day with the $49 dedicated server hovering at 2% utilization in CPU for Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Nginx, and Django Python. > the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues Backups are a once and forget it style process. A simple cronjob can backup to another disk or upload to S3. Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are.