Comment by marginalia_nu

Emphasis on "doable".

At least if we're speaking a more generalist web search it requires dedicated hardware, that's pretty costly. Marginalia's production server cost about $20k back when RAM and SSDs were cheap. It used to run on $5k of PC hardware before, but that was very limiting.

So no data center, but at the same time, not everyone has that sort of cash to throw around.