Indeed. I mean, it may very well be true, and without time to analyze, if you are highly confident in nginx and the rest of your server setup (it's not some other user definiable limit) you might as well.

That said - building websites to handle load has no magic bullet. Sure, nginx is good. Far-future expires headers and cache-busting schemes to go with it are good too. CDN's are good. Varnish is good. Clusters are great too, for capacity and redundancy, but you need to be aware of stuff in all these cases, and every layer you add is also something else to manage and something else to break..... so really it has to come from test-driven results regarldess, so you are spot on.

My beef with services like this (granted I haven't investigated fully) is I don't want hosted stuff. I get that's a huge market, but for confidentiality and other reasons, there is also a market for slightly more traditional stuff.

I'd love a toolkit to make it easy to build arbitrary animated control panel-y things a-la Quest Spotlight on <whatever> for my apps... havent' found it yet, anyone know one?