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I think you underestimate their size. They were a lot larger than a home server. As far as hosting, it can certainly be done privately, but it requires more w

• alkonaut 6y ago
  They had thousands of machines, but it's hard to imagine why that is. It would be very interesting to get a description of what their hardware is actually doing. Considering how StackeOverflow ran on a small handful of machines to a pretty large scale (and still isn't excessive), I can't see how more than a few machines should be necessary to run a site that serves small texts, even among millions of users. There is one caveat though and that's media. If media is transcoded, and/or if more than a small fraction of messages contain video - then the service might face using most of its resources towards that. But in that case , if I was running their ops I'd just disable media attachments while figuring out how to run the full service.