My $5/mo server can handle several thousand requests per second. It’s mostly a question of what server software you use. If you use some node, python, ruby thing, it’s going to be slow as shit and need a reverse proxy in front of it. If you use a fast compiled language with a good framework, you can rip through requests no problem.
I tried a bunch of different stuff and ended up using Haskell - all of its popular web libraries are fast as hell. Go was fast but its standard library leaked sockets or I was not cleaning up connections properly or something, and it would tank whenever something went viral. All the popular interpreted language backend I tried were absurdly slow, like tens of RPS.
Source for my current thing is at http://yager.io/Server.hs. It also does all my RSS stuff, image processing for my photo gallery, etc.
I tried a bunch of different stuff and ended up using Haskell - all of its popular web libraries are fast as hell. Go was fast but its standard library leaked sockets or I was not cleaning up connections properly or something, and it would tank whenever something went viral. All the popular interpreted language backend I tried were absurdly slow, like tens of RPS.
Source for my current thing is at http://yager.io/Server.hs. It also does all my RSS stuff, image processing for my photo gallery, etc.