@binford2k @GeePawHill My techblog uses a CGI that runs a giant Python program (with some efficiency hacks some of the time), on a shared VM that has a total of 4 GB of RAM and a not that modern CPU. It has repeatedly made the front page of that orange site and a few other places, and basically no one has noticed.
It isn't the machines that are slow, it's the software. (And my other rant is "you don't need static HTML to stand up to loads", although static HTML makes it much, much easier.)