Provisioning for 2.5x of peak load would be pretty expensive and, in most cases, overly cautious (good luck selling 10x to your financers!). For a large servi

Provisioning for 2.5x of peak load would be pretty expensive and, in most cases, overly cautious (good luck selling 10x to your financers!). For a large service that wants to be able to handle unexpected spikes, I'd expect something more like 1.1-1.5x margin. As their blog post says, they weren't unprepared. They had the means to grow and used it. Burning money before that time wasn't necessary.