per year? per month? per day? simultaneously? doing what?
it matters.
i ask this as someone who runs a $40/mo Linode with a debian/nginx/node/mysql stack that's definitely 20x over-provisioned for an e-commerce site with 10k daily visitors, 15 simultaneous backend users (reporting, order-entry, CRM, analytics) and 0 caching tricks. i could easily run the site on any 5 year old laptop with an SSD and 8GB RAM.
normalize/de-normalize when needed, understand and hand-write efficient SQL queries (ditch ORMs), choose small/fast libs carefully (or write your own), and you can easily serve 100k users per day on a single cheap VPS with no orchestration/replication/hz-scaling bullshit. definitely can't say the same about 200k simultaneous users - that would need proper hardware, but can still be a single server.
per year? per month? per day? simultaneously? doing what?
it matters.
i ask this as someone who runs a $40/mo Linode with a debian/nginx/node/mysql stack that's definitely 20x over-provisioned for an e-commerce site with 10k daily visitors, 15 simultaneous backend users (reporting, order-entry, CRM, analytics) and 0 caching tricks. i could easily run the site on any 5 year old laptop with an SSD and 8GB RAM.
normalize/de-normalize when needed, understand and hand-write efficient SQL queries (ditch ORMs), choose small/fast libs carefully (or write your own), and you can easily serve 100k users per day on a single cheap VPS with no orchestration/replication/hz-scaling bullshit. definitely can't say the same about 200k simultaneous users - that would need proper hardware, but can still be a single server.
Monoliths Are the Future: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193383