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This is certainly the case now. You have too much technical debt.

For future projects should you continue to use Django/Python, or something with better performance?

Should this be a lesson to me as a Django developer, that I'm better off starting a company on a different stack if I want to keep server costs low?

It obviously depends on the project, but for something like Disqus or anything else large in terms of size, I'd still go with Django.

For some personal projects, I like to use werkzeug, but they usually are very small and don't do much. :)

I also write things personally in Go if it makes sense. But the Go work is typically not for web services.