> sqlite.org answers more than 500,000 HTTP requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 200GB of content per day (about 18 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average on this machine normally stays around 0.5.
If you’re just serving static content then of course you can get away with one small box.
If you have user content that’s being constantly updated and inserted you need a lot more.
You need databases, caches, and in our case elastic search (with ~10 billion documents). The data needs to be indexed 16 ways to Sunday to make sure that a user hitting the page with this filter or that sort selects just the right records.
If you care about reliability you should have read replicas of your DBs as well.
Where are your logs going? I’d expect servers for that as well.
Now alternative to a bunch of this you could just use SaaS products but that costs an arm and a leg.
Robots hit dynamic content at about twice the rate as humans: 14.12% versus 7.8%. About 34% of traffic is from robots, from what I can tell (though to be fair, many robots these days work hard to disguise themselves has human, so the actual percentage of robot traffic is likely much higher.)
Anyone saying otherwise failed to do basic capacity planning. Granted at any given time the number of junior/untrained/nontraditional engineers outnumber senior engineers so it’s not surprising things are build out of proportion, and I suspect that’s what’s behind the majority of the anecdotes.