Marco/Stack Overflow here. Simply put, this is not true at all. Most of the websites today run happily on a single box and the choice of architecture is frankl

Marco/Stack Overflow here. Simply put, this is not true at all. Most of the websites today run happily on a single box and the choice of architecture is frankly irrelevant because of the abysmal amount of traffic they get. Large, and by large I mean top 100 sites, are large and typically complex systems. Each one is different and bespoke. Making broad generalizations doesn't really work, because typically they have parts that need to be scaled up, parts that need to be scaled out, etc. Finally, if you read the article you would know that we already use a load balancer with multiple web servers. What we are discussing here is whether it's better to have 100s of cheap/cloud boxes versus a few big ones. In our use case (we want fast response times) the second solution is demonstrably better.