I ran a site (stomped.com) in the late '90s and we did this. We were serving up news items to millions of unique visitors a month and hitting the DB on each pag

I ran a site (stomped.com) in the late '90s and we did this. We were serving up news items to millions of unique visitors a month and hitting the DB on each page hit. Rather than try to implement a bunch of caching methods we went with generated HTML files. Given how often content changed (a few times an hour at most) it seemed a waste to generate 10s of thousands of db/cache hits when things rarely changed. Simple. Stable.