You're right, we aren't talking about page views or CRUD, but it can happen in a B2B application. I ended up working for a startup like that, so this was a rea

You're right, we aren't talking about page views or CRUD, but it can happen in a B2B application. I ended up working for a startup like that, so this was a real anecdotal example. Our stuff was built to run on the JVM and we managed to get away with a variable number of instances between 15 and 30 (at the time we used c1.medium, which are now deprecated) - AWS's ELB is great in such a scenario as it can be configured to bring up new instances in case of traffic spikes, or kill them in case they were unused. So for us, AWS was saving us money, however that's because we were very efficient. My opinion is that if you're expecting your startup to grow soon (and I'm not talking about wishful thinking, but about requirements that have to happen for survival - i.e. you either get the desired contracts or you don't), then you have to prepare for it.