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I'm looking to host a website that could get anywhere between 200-20,000 active users. I'm wondering if I should buy a modern dedicated server with dual socket and a lot of cores (32-120) to run containers with auto-scaling and load balancing or if I should buy 20 inexpensive i5/i7 desktop machines with 4 cores, I would run 2 containers per core so I'd be looking at a situation where I would have either.

1 server running 64-200 containers for ($3000-7000) - depending on how many cores which model CPU I purchased or 20 desktop machines running 160 containers - for about $3000

Josh James Saunders
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    Does this answer your question? Can you help me with my capacity planning? – djdomi Feb 18 '24 at 06:07
  • Moreover, the computing power is not usually the issue. It mostly depends on how good does a site perform and has been optimized and cached used. As also how long can you outstand an outage. at that case a modern rasbian could host even "high" traffic sites – djdomi Feb 18 '24 at 06:10
  • It is >20 years since Google came up with the idea of using distributed systems on commodity hardware. And here we are again. But if you don't have existing customers/users - buy a minimal cloud instance to run your MVP. – AlexD Feb 18 '24 at 06:27
  • You're missing the power/cooling/physical hosting costs from your calculations. – Mat Feb 18 '24 at 06:36
  • Thanks I guess I'm genuinly curious what the smarter way to go here is... I have spent decades working with server infrastructure and modern cloud, however I want to self host this for my own reasons, the single biggest bottleneck I can see is the database requests which in a situation with a lot of seperate less powerful machines would be worse as the database would have to be running either copied and in sync to every machine or one a bunch of them, where on the dedicated single server it would always be basically local. of course memcache would solve this but get complex fast. – Josh James Saunders Feb 18 '24 at 07:31

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