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The reality is that most startups don't scale exponentially unless they are injecting huge amounts of cash into their company (and in that case they can afford AWS). The company in this article just has a single server.

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However, most services that are around for a long time experience bursty traffic so provisioning is still difficult.

Fun fact: Hacker News runs on a single core.

Sarcasm?

"HN's main software runs on a single core", wrote a moderator when I wrote to ask about why rapid (<2s?) subsequent actions were rejected by the server (ie. like a post and then favorite it).

This was November 2020 and he mentioned a big overhaul was in the works (of both HN and Arc, the programming language in which it is written).

We've seen new features since then, but the throttling is still there so it seems to still be the same situation regarding fundamental infrastructure.

I didn't know that. thats very impressive.

It really depends on a lot of factors such as technology, amount of traffic, etc. My server handles about 200 simultaneous users on a few % of cpu. I think most startups will have a smaller load than this unless they become incredibly successful or pour tons of cash into growth.

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