Most web sites are just grabbing data from databases. If you use an async front-end, it&#x27;s the database servers that need to scale, because they&#x27;re doing the heavy lifting. But scaling your database infrastructure can be orthogonal to scaling the application layer; in Node, except for under extreme load, you may never NEED to scale the application layer. And for really high load situations, you may need 25-50x fewer Node servers than PHP.<p>It&#x27;s the poor design of most systems that cause them to not scale; there are certainly exceptions where the server needs to do a lot of complex calculations, but those calculations can most of the time be handled in microservices and, again, scaled orthogonally to the application layer.