Hey - I'm the reporter who wrote this story.

I wrote the headline to make it clear that this was coming from a single source. I am not an expert in hosting or infrastructure.

That being said, there is an interesting discussion going on over at Betabeat. To quote on comment = "At one side is platform as a service or managed platforms on top of EC2 -- Heroku, EngineYard (which Groupon appears to use), etc. These are easy to set up, and have lower overhead for small or medium organizations. They have the highest per-unit cost, but for rapidly growing or small organizations, can be worth it."

I think its fair to say Groupon is a large company and past the point of its most rapid growth. To me that fits with the idea that they are looking to make a transition but have not accomplished it yet, whether that change is moving to EC2 or building their own data center.

More importantly, IF they have that many pageviews, it ought to be scaling in proportion to deals with sales of groupons. So either their margins are horrible, or their tech cost per unit sold is horrible, or something else we don't know about is causing the issue.

It could be they're trying to estimate based on handling their growth for the next three years, for example, in which case of course the cost could be horribly out of whack with current revenues.

You might be surprised; I know Alexa isn't exactly an infallible oracle, but they list groupon.com as averaging between the 200th and 400th most visited site globally, and 53rd in the US. "ranking.com", whoever they are, says between 150 and 75. I'd feel confident saying they're at least in the top 500, and that requires a fair bit of horsepower. Now, they could probably solve a lot of their problems with smarter engineering before building a data center, but they certainly have traffic.

Stackoverflow.com has an Alexa ranking of 108 for the world and 165 for the US. Last I heard they were not using that many servers for their site.