I can confirm. I've had quite a few projects that made it to the front page of HN and handled the traffic like cake. All of them ran on 5$ digital ocean droplets.
I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time.
Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture that made cloud app deployments unnecessarily complicated with k8s and cool new tech (that'd get them high profile jobs.) I've never come across a devops person who'd say "Hey, that sofware is too simple to prematurely scale for sudden spikes of irrational amounts of traffic, so why not just deploy it on a cheap vps?"
I accept some projects are more resource expensive than others, but majority of the time you can get away with a bit of asynchronous responses + scheduler/queue to spread the load horizontally over time.
Unpopular opinion: I blame the new age devops culture that made cloud app deployments unnecessarily complicated with k8s and cool new tech (that'd get them high profile jobs.) I've never come across a devops person who'd say "Hey, that sofware is too simple to prematurely scale for sudden spikes of irrational amounts of traffic, so why not just deploy it on a cheap vps?"