Comment by maxbond

"Hitting the front page of Reddit" is a metanym for, "today you suddenly have many multiples of the previous day's traffic banging down your door, for reasons entirely outside of your control or ability to foresee." I agree this is a huge revenue opportunity - but if you can't stay up, you may not be able to capitalize on it.

This & sibling comments seem to imagine that every application is some special case of static web hosting, and if that is the domain you're working in I can see how you may be able to cheaply over provision to the point where you don't really worry about downtime. If you don't need distributed computing, definitely don't apply distributed computing to your problem and you'll have a cheaper and better time. I'm not some kind of cloud maximalist; if you're telling me you've done some diligence for your application and it's better off at Hetzner, sure, I believe it.

I'm pretty skeptical that this is most applications, however. Consider a browser based MMORPG where each interaction in the game will fire off one or many requests, and each player interacts several times a second. If hitting the front page results in hundreds of new players, it's easy to imagine having thousands of QPS.