Stack Overflow is a remarkable company. They bet on C# and ASP.NET MVC 1.0 in 2008 and they still host their own server infrastructure in their basement while being one of the 20 most visited sites in the world.
A lazy company would use some dynamic language and tons of cloud VMs and pay 100x for the hosting.
It's worse when the project is outsourced to vendors, since time used for optimization is a wasted cost for vendor, while business is unlikely to pay for optimization unless it's really severe.