Load balancers and HA setups were already in use. LVS existed. VMs were popular. "CI/CD" existed, without that name.
> 2005 your average box ...
Speak for yourself.
Sure we built a bunch of it ourselves, and we had 4 sysadmins, but please don't tell me that this wasn't already going on over 20 years ago.
By 2004 we were doing perforce and CI. No Continuous Deployment because we were building on-prem software, but by 2008 I was doing svn and Continuous Delivery (similar problem, not hosting).
We would have been if it had been appropriate.
To be fair though, I think a lot of my coworkers suspect i’m talking out of my ass because they’ve been doing this stuff for 5-8 years and think everyone else has too. As tempting as it sometimes is to launch into a lecture., it wouldn’t really help. Everybody knows what they know, and they’re going to know it until they watch it catch on fire and then they will either want to hear about alternatives or they’ll share ideas for fixing it, not realizing they’re repeating something you told them two years ago. Hey that’s a great idea, wish I’d thought of it.