Bespoke hardware is much cheaper, has much more consistent performance, and a beefy dedicated machine is much faster than a large AWS slice. If you can run your

Bespoke hardware is much cheaper, has much more consistent performance, and a beefy dedicated machine is much faster than a large AWS slice. If you can run your entire web app on a single server you have much less infrastructure to worry about, which is a big plus. All this vertical vs horizontal scaling nonsense makes your software so much more complex, and with a tiny bit of optimization it's often not needed. Besides, HN also uses cloudflare as CDN and DDOS protection, so it's not like they're stuck in 1999.