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by PudgePacket 2316 days ago
I've heard lots of anecdotes from big sites doing fine with a small number of machines.

eg stackoverflow only has 1 active DB server, and 1 backup.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

1 comments

Actually, this makes a lot of sense. Reasoning about a single machine is just way simpler and keeps the full power of a modern transactional database at your fingertips. Backups keep taking longer and disaster recovery isn‘t as speedy anymore, but we‘re running on Postgres internally as well and I‘d scale that server as big as possible (even slightly beyond linear cost growth, which is pretty huge these days) before even thinking about alternatives.