I’ve been in web hosting since 1995. Back in the day I was the Tech Lead for IRS.gov (1998-2000). We had BIG IRON (hand me down HP K Class servers) from a failed IRS project (Cyberfile). They were so big,  at 14U (24.5 inches tall) and weighed so much (~130 pounds), that we placed 1 server per rack.  We had to build to support all traffic on Tax Day (April 15th). Cloud wasn’t even an idea yet. There were few MSPs and while Akamai CDN was established, IRS was leery of using aan external provider. We had a Cisco Local Director Load Balancer and grew to sipport Geographic Load Balancers (Alteons) in 3 locations. I personally had to forecast peak traffic and we built for peak load.
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