Reddit did a story about how they're scaling up on Amazon, and what struck me was how low the demand really was. They were serving up 100 hits per second.

I remember working on a solution in the 2000/2001 era that dynamically generated pages in the 300 renders per second range...on a low end desktop.

Scaling out for a lot of these guys allows them to manage to duct-tape something together in spite of their abilities, not because of it.

To be fair, if so many are so bad at relational databases, maybe it is best for the world that they just move away from it before they injure someone.