I'm looking to host a website that could get anywhere between 200-20,000 active users. I'm wondering if I should buy a modern dedicated server with dual socket and a lot of cores (32-120) to run containers with auto-scaling and load balancing or if I should buy 20 inexpensive i5/i7 desktop machines with 4 cores, I would run 2 containers per core so I'd be looking at a situation where I would have either.
1 server running 64-200 containers for ($3000-7000) - depending on how many cores which model CPU I purchased or 20 desktop machines running 160 containers - for about $3000
