I think the most amazing thing that have enabled startups to grow is the existence of $5 VPS using hosts like Digital Ocean or any of the other ones out there.

I think the most amazing thing that have enabled startups to grow is the existence of $5 VPS using hosts like Digital Ocean or any of the other ones out there. However, one of the things that seems to kills performance these days is the massive amount of code abstraction layers we put in place which unfortunately increases the overhead by a massive amount. In our case, I started and successfully exited a crypto trading service (tradedash.io which was sold to Bittrex.com) that made billions of dollars in transactions using nothing more than 2x $5 VPS. Our entire tech stack costed us less than $75 dollars per month. The backend API handled massive amounts of trading data as you can imagine using those two servers and they never even got close to being at full utility - even when tens of thousands of orders were placed and cancelled at the same exact second. We had thousands upon thousands of users hammering our servers with requests every second of every day and the dropplets did just fine. At the end of the day, it all comes down to building out your infrastructure properly. Clean your code base, use only what you need when you need it and make sure things are as fast and secure as possible. Dont over-complicate things for yourself and dont add abstraction layers just for the sake of it. That to me is the essence of good software and the main benefit of that is less overall headache as I dont have to go in and engineer a solution every time something breaks in some random library or abstraction layer. Scale will also be a fortunate side-effect of that as well.