[3pt14159]

To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.

[devwastaken]

To be fairest you can serve pages on a potato and as long as it's cached by cloudflare no one will know.

[vmception]

and yet, they didn't

[vangelis]

Is there a CDN sitting between your small droplet and the world?

[newswasboring]

But... We do realize the skills required to make and evaluate a super computers is vastly different from web serving right?

Sure some principals may be common due to the distributed network but the actual practical tools have nothing in common.

[runawaybottle]

What’s your stack, and how much traffic?

[gtufano]

I survived without errors from being to HN front page with Nginx and a static site (made with Hugo, iirc) on a Linode 1GB (when the plan was still existing). No CDN whatsoever.

[phkahler]

That sounds reasonable to me. In the old days people used Apache because it was available and worked. But because the performance was shit they adopted other complex means of dealing with heavy loads. Nginx has dramatically improved the web server performance problem but a lot of old practices are still in place.