Combined with a CDN and you can do a lot more, I like to think in terms of origin requests rather than raw req/s. The problem I have is getting people to really

Combined with a CDN and you can do a lot more, I like to think in terms of origin requests rather than raw req/s. The problem I have is getting people to really understand how caching works at the cdn and browser layers and design their frontends and backend responses around that. There is also lot you can do with edge compute to clean the incoming requests before the CDN evaluates them to increase cache hits. Even if you are trying to give a "real time" view of data, caching it for even a second and allowing stale data to be served while it is updating can reduce origin requests significantly. I've seen people hammer sites hundreds of times a second looking for changes that only happen once every fifteen seconds or once per minute - the best thing you can do for yourself is handle all those requests at the CDN level (eventually you'll do log analysis and see the activity and can take other measures, but in the mean time don't let all of those requests go to the origin). Your CDN is probably giving you better rates for network egress then Amazon or Google anyway - the later are more focused on incentivizing you to use their ecosystem exclusively by penalizing you for sending data "outside". Cheap VPS hosts discourage you exceeding your bandwidth allocation because they are overselling their capacity and heavy usage upsets that - so again you want to shift as much as you can to your CDN.