The really huge traffic spike is the lie. Most of the time you have a pretty good idea how much traffic you will get. Only once in 20 years we noticed that our

The really huge traffic spike is the lie. Most of the time you have a pretty good idea how much traffic you will get. Only once in 20 years we noticed that our servers are getting too much traffic, because too much people clicked on our advertising. So we stopped the ads, rented more servers and started the ads again. This took half a day and costed us a few hundred euros and that was that. We aren't doing any hyper scaling and almost nobody needs this. We start PHP workers on a few servers and put the database on a beefy Server. What a beefy Server is, changes over time. In 2005 this was like 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. Today you get like 24 cores and 128 GB RAM for about 200 € per month. On machines like that you can serve data for millions of users. AWS charges ridiculous amounts of money for servers like that. Also bandwidth pricing is a joke and always was.