From TFA: The only time you need to consider a client-server setup is: - Where you have multiple physical machines accessing the same database server over a n

From TFA: The only time you need to consider a client-server setup is: - Where you have multiple physical machines accessing the same database server over a network. In this setup you have a shared database between multiple clients. - If your machine is extremely write busy, like accepting thousand upon thousands of simultaneous write requests every second, then you also need a client-server setup because a client-server database is specifically build to handle that. - If you're working with very big datasets, like in the terabytes size. A client-server approach is better suited for large datasets because the database will split files up into smaller files whereas SQLite only works with a single file. I have run SQLite as a web application database with thousands concurrent writes every second, coming from different HTTP requests, without any delays or issues. This is because even on a very busy site, the hardware is extremely fast and fully capable of handling that. The claim is that most of the time you don't actually need multiple instances.