Is it really an actual issue? How often do you restart instances or scale up horizontally?
A cheap 10 years old desktop PC can easily handle all the traffic a medium-sized website generates at all times.
A cheap 10 years old desktop PC can easily handle all the traffic a medium-sized website generates at all times.
I think it's a good data point to have to scale your workload to stackoverflow's, and reconsider the hardware costs.
(Obviously horizontal scaling has its place, but if it's that variably scalable, maybe there are better solutions, e.g. a single bigger instance -- often times even for cheaper)