On the one hand (and as I mentioned in the post), yes, most employers are not as dumb as I'm making them sound. In principle they know they need to comprpmise - but in practice, they often balk at doing so because they haven't clearly articulated what they will compromise on.

Later you might have to worry about how to make sure your system can scale, how the overall architecture fits together, etc etc.. but even _having_ those problems is already somewhat of a luxury as it means your startup hasn't died yet.

That site appears to be running on an Amazon IP (on my traceroute, in the block https://ipinfo.io/AS16509/52.223.48.0/20). If it didn't load immediately, I wonder if you got unlucky enough to catch an autoscaler napping (or maybe they aren't autoscaling; sometimes dodging the hug of death completely isn't worth the cost, depending on how cost-sensitive a firm is).

(ETA: However, the DNS entry is willing to give some wildly different IPs for the lookup, and at least one of them appears to be flagged as abusive, so if you're behind a corporate firewall it's possible an auto-protector is blocking you).