I smile on reading this. I spent well over a decade hand-optimising SQL to do things like shaving a millisecond off a query, or helping (a little) to maintain a proprietary application server in C because it runs so fast we barely needed any servers to support one of the busiest web systems in the world. When you stack up the hardware and electricity costs and general bureaucracy costs of running hundreds of servers day in day out, then these economies do make sense.