[autokad]

in 2007/2008, I managed a GIS server / website that averaged 100 hits per day, but once every couple years the website would get listed in time/cnn and would get millions of hits.

I set up an EC2 instance behind a load balancer and set it to auto-scale. done. If I had to handle that bare bones, I would have had to upgrades switches, manage dozens of servers, deal with hard drive failures, etc., and most of that would be idle 99% of the time.