The modern web has a peculiar property: the fastest and most reliable sites are often the cheapest to run, while the slow and fragile ones tend to carry significant monthly infrastructure costs. This inversion is counterintuitive if you assume that performance scales with spend, but it makes perfect sense once you understand that most of the complexity that makes websites expensive is complexity they introduced themselves.

A static site served from a CDN edge node is faster than a dynamically rendered WordPress site on a VPS for a structural reason: it involves fewer moving parts. There is no database query, no PHP execution, no server-side rendering happening at request time. The HTML file exists, it gets delivered, the browser renders it. The chain from request to response is as short as it can physically be. Edge hosting providers like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and GitHub Pages offer this at zero cost for most traffic levels because the infrastructure cost to them is genuinely low.

The default assumption in web development is that serious applications run on serious databases, and serious databases means a separate server process, connection pooling, user management, and a configuration file that will eventually be wrong in a way that takes an afternoon to diagnose. MySQL and PostgreSQL are excellent databases. They are also, for the median small site, a solution in search of a problem — infrastructure designed for concurrency, scale, and replication requirements that don’t exist at any traffic level the site will realistically see for years.