95M/mo translates to a mere 36/sec avg. A single web- and db-server will handle that without breaking a sweat, although you of course want some more machines for peaks, redundancy and comfort.
Sorry, the threshold of interestingness for serving static assets is even higher. ;)
A single nginx on a moderate host will barely warm up before ~10k reqs/sec. The network tends to be the bottleneck here. Anyways, ~800/s should be doable from a $10 VPS.
Either way I didn't mean to discount their efforts. Was just trying to point out that their architecture is not very interesting from a performance point of view, yet.
Which suggests that even sites with a medium-to-large internet presence, which dominatre thier niche, can do so with "uninteresting" architecture.
Absolutely. Hardware is evolving so fast (Moore's Law & friends) that we humans have a hard time to keep up mentally.
Go back six years in time and the traffic they're dealing would have required roughly 24 servers, instead of the 3 that they have today.
This is of course a rough extrapolation and six years seems like an eternity on the internet-calendar.
However we're quickly approaching a point where there's only two scales left to worry about: "normal" and "web-scale", with only a few hundred sites falling into the latter category.