I can't quite imagine these numbers. My dedicated root (32gigs RAM, i3770K with 4*3.2ghz) costs 40€ a month and has unlimited traffic. Looking at the user IDs I would guess that DN has about 30k users, lets say only one fifth is registered, that would make about 150k regular visitors.

Small Assumption.. everyone of these 150k interacts with the page 20 times a day, makes 3 Million Requests. Given that the day has 86k seconds and a (php) framework like lumen could take up to 3k requests per second a site should be able to handle quite a few million requests per day. So in the best case and with good coding this website should run on one of such roots, but lets add 5 of these hosts and we'd have 200€ a month for 5 beasty root servers. What's adding up cost here? Is the service included in these 1-2k per month or is rails so much more expensive or what's the reason behind it? I mean DN doesn't even host images, it's basically pure text, aside from the profile pics.