It shouldn't. The issue is that most developers would rather spin up another instance of their server than solve the performance issue in their code, so now it's a common belief that computers are really slow to serve content.

And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.

With a 2025 tech stack, yes. With a 2005 tech stack, no. Don't use any containers, no[/limited] server-side dynamic script languages, no microservices or anything like that.

Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem.

Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.

I just fired up a container on my laptop... running on kubernetes... running in a linux VM. It's lightly dynamic (no database or filesystem I/O).

While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.

I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.

Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.

If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.

So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.

No it won't. This is static content we're talking about. The only thing limiting you is your network throughput and maybe disk IO (assuming it doesn't fit in a compressed RAM). Even for an "around the globe roundtrip" latency, we're still talking few hundred msec.

Some cloud products have distorted an entire generation of developers understanding of how services can scale.

I think it’s more helpful to discuss this in requests per second.

I’d interpret “thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day” as something like 10,000 people making ~5 requests per 24 hours. That’s 0.5 requests per second.

A 6 core server or laptop can easily serve 100K requests per second, so 259B requests per month. 576x more than their current load.

A laptop from 10 years ago should be able to comfortably serve that. Computers are really really fast. I'm sorry, thousands of users or tens of thousands of requests a day is nothing.

It all depends of course, but generally no, a laptop could handle that just fine.