Learning to be a developer is still a hodge-podge, unstructured process, scaling is definitely not taught and often talked about in extremely abstract terms because a lot of authors have no clue themselves what is and isn't scalable.
A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.
Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.
That's because scaling is not in the domain of developers, as much as Heroku/AWS/etc. strive to blur the lines. It's in system administration and architecture.
A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.
Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.