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Stackoverflow's architecture, while more than just one server, is very much in the spirit of this and I'd say they're a highly successful high traffic website.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

9 IIS web servers, 1 SQL server (plus one hot standby SQL) with 1.5 TB of ram and 2 redis serving 1.3 billion views a month. And if anything they've been scaling down their architeture over the years as hardware gets better and their software improves: in 2016 they ran 11 web servers for example. Notice how little CPU usage they've got, even in peak usage, it's really about I/O ie lots of RAM and fast storage.

So it depends on the use cases, but I do not think "I need the cloud" is the automatic answer to "I am making something for the web". In fact the vast majority of people will never even get close to the level of traffic SO has.

Of course, even with low traffic, some type of software would highly benefit from a distributed cloud architecture. Can't really make a search engine that indexes the whole internet on so little. But are you making the next google?

Their stack is certainly a lot, lot, lot cheaper to run in the long term than going with Amazon's blood sucking costs.