This is a great post. I just wrote about a project I worked on in February[1]. When I first built the website, it wasn't optimized and now I realize that I greatly over estimated how many resources I thought the site would need.
Last week, after getting to the first page on Google's search results, I'm getting about 12,000 hits a week. Monitoring shows my daily CPU usage is nearly 0%, and memory usage around 32MB. Today(3 months later) I finally did some SEO, added compression, caching, and a CDN to get drop page load time from ~2 seconds to under 500ms.