[rerdavies]

Google's 1st server was housed in a cabinet of Lego bricks. No server rack.

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg

Google's first server farm consisted on row after row of regular desktop machines on the floor. Also no server racks.

But sooner or later, you're going to need one of these: https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/

The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?)

I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.