[Quothling]

Is this really playing the devil's advocate though? I know this is a simplification but Stack Overflow launched on a couple of IIS servers and rode their exponential growth rather well. Sure they added more than "a couple" of web servers and improved their SQL server quite a bit, but as far as I recall they didn't even shift to CDN until five or six years after they grew. Eventually they moved into the cloud, but Spliit doesn't even have a fraction of the traffic SO did in its early days. As such I don't think any of the challenges you mention are all that relevant in the context aside from having backup. Perhaps also some redundancy by having two $4 droplets?

Is the author even getting paid for their services though? If they aren't then why would they care? I don't mean that as rude as it sounds, but why would they pay that much money so people can use their product for free?