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I don’t disagree fully with this post but I find the 150/s and 11M/s disingenuous. Sure, if load was constant and spread out over 24 hours. But it’s not, it comes in waves and spikes. Sometimes it’s cost-effective to have big enough box to handle the spikes sitting around mostly idle the rest of the time, sometimes it’s not, it comes down to utilization.

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I agree. Depending on the type of hypothetical website, you could expect that most traffic comes e.g. during the week at business hours, or maybe in the evening after work. You need to design for that spike in workload (maybe 10x?)

There was a story recently about running the workload of Twitter from a single machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34291191

Yes - possible but no redundancy, difficult maintenance

Twitter is a much wilder size category.

If you want to handle 10x spikes over 11MB/s, then you need a single gigabit port. That's not hard to get, nor hard to feed.

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