He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic.<p>At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you&#x27;d be able to handle it easily.<p>People underestimate what good caching can give you. I had an application that would only be able to handle 20&#x2F;req&#x2F;second without caching. With aggressive caching, it could handle 2100&#x2F;req&#x2F;second so long as that was all reads; and that was true. It handled 40,000 people a day with the $49 dedicated server hovering at 2% utilization in CPU for Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Nginx, and Django Python.<p>&gt; the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues<p>Backups are a once and forget it style process. A simple cronjob can backup to another disk or upload to S3.<p>Zero-day security issues? They&#x27;re handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are.