10 years ago I had a site running on an 8GB of ram VM ($80/mo?) that ran a site serving over 200K daily active users on a completely dynamic site written in PHP running MySQL locally. Super fast and never went down!
Could you share how long you maintained this website?
No problem with the db (schema updates, backups, replication, etc...)?
No problem with your app updates (downtime, dependencies updates, code updates)?
Did you work alone, or with a team?
Did you setup a CI/CD?
...
I wrote down some questions, but in fact I just think it would be interesting to understand what was your setup in a bit more detailed fashion. You probably made some concessions and it seems they worked well for you. Would be interesting to know which ones!
