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.

Tax Day was always like the scene in Das Boot (1981) where the the U boat is driving and the hull is being crushed by the pressure. That stress peaked on the 15th.

Months of work and worry all came down to a single day. There was no way to add more capacity and no way to slow the onslaught of late taxpayers. To make it even more ‘fun’, numerous firms (Red Alert, Intuit, etc.) were tracking and reporting our response times throughout the day. There was no escape. Just prayer that we would make it through, without crashing and burning.

These days, we scale automatically, by default.

Yes, it’s better, but not nearly as ‘exciting’.