I've worked with a lot of "smart" engineers over my career with whom autoscaling is a completely foreign concept, or a half-baked concept at best. My favorite is devs pushing to migrate to k8s because it "scales" and won't hear a single thing otherwise.

For a static blog you dont need that. My blog made the (near bottom of) HN front page last year. I didn't notice a thing until I looked at the traffic report (using goaccess). Static site generator with the result served from a bottom of the barrel Hetzner VPS, using nginx.

If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.

Look at the techempower benchmarks, even python stuff can handle 40k requests per second involving database lookups, and when things are cachable compiled/JITed languages scale to millions on 2 CPUs. And if you object that those are microbenchmarks, I have seen this in real systems too. E.g. converting a convoluted hairball of python, lambdas and SQS to a Rust service running on 2vCPUs reduced latencies from seconds to milliseconds.

The "If necessary I can add autoscaling later" mindset is what leads to bloated, slow websites.

You don't need autoscaling for a basic blog to handle the traffic of Hacker News. People have had "this page is hosted on <vintage computer>" sites hit the front page that have stayed up.

why do you need autoscaling for an (essentially) static website?