> [...] buying a larger server and scaling that way was much more cost-effective. I think that's still true, to a point, even if you didn't have the licensing c

> [...] buying a larger server and scaling that way was much more cost-effective. I think that's still true, to a point, even if you didn't have the licensing cost. I don't know if in the cloud world this still holds true, considering that (at least in AWS) if you vertical scale 2x you get usually a 2x price increase. Clearly I'm not factoring costs of making an app horizontally scalable or DB-shards aware (which I think was always the main selling point for SO vertical scaling: they usually referred to the DB, and they were against sharding)