I'll bite. How do you serve 100x the traffic without 100x the costs? It costs something like 1e-10 dollars to serve a recipe page with a few photos, for example. If you serve it 100x more times, how does that not scale up?

It might scale up but if you're anywhere near efficient you're way overprovisioned to begin with. The compute cost should be miniscule due to caching and bandwidth is cheap if you're not with one of the big clouds. As an example, according to dang HN runs on a single server and yet many websites that get posted to HN, and thus receive a fraction of the traffic, go down due to the load.