"It's exactly the kind of intensely-dynamic application that seems inconceivable to build statically" Statically is to some degree how these things used to wor

"It's exactly the kind of intensely-dynamic application that seems inconceivable to build statically" Statically is to some degree how these things used to work. Before hosting with databases was widely available, internet forum software (such as UBB) used to work by regenerating all the affected pages when posting new threads and replies. They relied on simple files as the data source. They worked really well to a point, until each update took so long as to be intolerable. The practice was then to prune older content to fix the performance issues. The biggest problem area for SSGs is sites with user-specific content where dynamic "pop-in" after load isn't a tolerable solution, or where there's a combinatorial explosion of pages. The ecommerce example is interesting because it's not the 50m product pages that's the problem, it's all the faceted navigation/search pages where it _may_ be desirable to support search indexing, the number of unique pages here may as well be considered unlimited. All of these problems are solvable with SSGs to some degree, but there's always going to be a tipping point where the amount of engineering contortion you're having to perform just to avoid using servers isn't worth it. Especially when we have a little thing called cache headers which work really well if you set them up correctly.