I'm surprised no one is chiming in from the LAMP era. Maybe I was just in a bubble, but I feel like before modern cloud providers, folks deploying on VPSs tried

I'm surprised no one is chiming in from the LAMP era. Maybe I was just in a bubble, but I feel like before modern cloud providers, folks deploying on VPSs tried to keep operational complexity lower by running their database on the same box until they couldn't anymore. In my experience, I just cached the living hell out of the apps to avoid the I/O from the database. Providers in those days had huge issues with noisy neighbors, so I/O performance was quite poor. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)