Yeah - I think all of that supports my point. Aside from security (which most users wouldn't be able to verify in any case) none of those things are relevant to

Yeah - I think all of that supports my point. Aside from security (which most users wouldn't be able to verify in any case) none of those things are relevant to low-traffic chat. i.e. "talk to our live advisors" or "collaborate with another user". The bandwidth and load is tiny and I can imagine handling hundreds or thousands of concurrent users with a traditional architecture and commodity hosting.