Agreed, until you raise it at the right level at the right time. People do not find me for nothing... Usually after the initial launch euphoria dies down and someone looks at the books and asks why such a large % of the expenditure goes there. People start looking around online and see things like ‘our application serves 200k requests/day with one 50$/mo server’ and compare that with their 30k/mo setup barely serving 50k/day and start poking around. It is usually apples and pears, but more often than not there are massive issues. Most of them I would consider beginner issues but they are not made by beginners; many senior programmers I meet simply do not know about normal forms, proper types (all are stringy), proper indexes, O(n^2) etc; they trust cloud scaling to solve it all. And it does! But it costs...

And ofcourse, there is a limit to what you want to spend even if it might make some profit long term. You need to be able to find programmers to maintain things etc as well. If I needed something handling massive traffic while handling real business logic but not allowed to cost more than a few bucks in hosting, I would use something like [0]. But that would be silly for maintenance reasons alone. Does anyone know a modern (well maintained I mean really) equivalent though? I played around with this a long time ago and it is incredibly efficient.

[0] http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ (github; https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw as sourceforge seems down)

Edit; maybe I answered that last question by finding a github version: seems waywardgeek does maintain at least to keep it running.