But ... we are ... basically by definition. Vanishing little projects actually need cloud scale infrastructure.

And, to address your previous statement: one beefy server is actually pretty scalable. Soft threads spin up in microseconds to serve incoming requests, communication between threads is blazing fast, caching is simpler on one machine, etc. You don't even have to worry to much about scaling, the CPU just throttles itself when there is no load.

And every once in a while you just upgrade to the next gen beefy machine.