[sph]

Web Scale was first a meme, than an ideal everyone pushes towards even when deploying their small scale blog. Who knows what'll happen if suddenly you get a million concurrent users tomorrow? Better scale it geographically and put it behind a CDN today. Look at those generous free tiers.

Like you said, it's mostly snake oil except for very big players.

[pid-1]

I'd say using stuff like Netlify or GH Pages for static sites is worth it even if you have zero traffic. They legit are much easier to use than setting up your own VPS.

[fauigerzigerk]

This isn't quite the same thing as trying to scale like Google though. Low latency is very important for usability regardless of how many users you serve. How easy it is to achieve depends more on the geographical distribution of your users than on their number.

If my app has a handful of users that are split between the US and Europe or Asia, and the app is 90% reads, then the distributed DB approach of fly.io or Cloudflare makes a lot of sense. It also adds considerable complexity though, so it's obviously a tradeoff.