Stack Overflow vs Cloud

podcast interview with site admin + MANY great web links
Optimizing Websites like Stack Overflow - MS Dev Show Podcast

Apparently site is still running on a single IIS and SQL Server! 44th global web site!
So what is the "trick?" Continuous "engineering optimization" of every part of system.
Most important next improvement: HTTP 2.0

Claiming that be price just for SQL databases on Azure would be for a month that they paid for the server! An alternative to consider to overcome 1 TM size limitation on a single database, one can run a VM with SQL server on Azure with limit higher. I would suggest using "G Series" VMs.

Stackoverflow.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa
Global Rank   44 3
Rank in China   33

Nick Craver - Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition



Performance - Stack Exchange

Pricing - Windows Virtual Machines | Microsoft Azure