I worked for the biggest job site in my country. They get thousands of doom-scrollers every day, and their revenue was ~$55M last year. Admittedly, those numb

I worked for the biggest job site in my country. They get thousands of doom-scrollers every day, and their revenue was ~$55M last year. Admittedly, those numbers are peanuts compared to some global SaaS providers. But they managed to work for decades on two moderately beefy servers, and a database server, behind a load balancer. Heck, one server was always enough. The second one was there for redundancy, during releases and in case of emergency. Traffic peaked at 80% during nation-wide flow-tv commercials. As flow-tv is on the way out, the traffic has spread out a lot more. They used Perl, which isn't insanely fast, it was just well-made (enough caching, no N+1 queries, etc.). "That point" where auto-scaling is the obvious choice is pretty far out.