Issue is network saturation. Most VPSs have limited bandwidth (1Gbps), even if their CPUs could serve tens of thousands of req/s.

Even 1 Gbps is plenty to handle 1,000 connections unless you're serving up video.

That's 1 Mbps per user. If your web page can't render (ignoring image loading) within a couple seconds even on a connection that slow, you're doing something wrong. Maybe stop using 20 different trackers and shoving several megabytes of JavaScript to the user.

You can always host your stuff on a few machines and then create a few DNS A records to load balance it on the DNS level :)

This sometimes works, sometimes not. Because of how DNS resolution works, you're totally at the mercy of how your DNS resolver and/or application behave.

Agreed. I was being generous to the CDN lovers :). Peope don't know how powerful static file servers like Nginx and Caddy are. You don't need no CDN.

For me, CDN is more valuable for avoidance of huge data transfer bills from the origin host, vs the endpoint getting overwhelmed. Obviously those are related and both could happen without a CDN, but the big bills scare me more at the end of the day.