Sorry for the late reply. We are using an older Hetzner with i7 6700, 64 gb and 500 GB SATA SSD. It’s quite ancient by modern standards and it is starting to show its age in some usecases. I am well aware the new machine is way too powerful for our current context but unfortunately the site is very old so it amassed a huge library of media of over 300gb over many years. If we plan to store it locally, we could probably compress it aggresively to free a few dozen GB, but to be fair it would only delay the inevitable upgrade. Clearly, an alternative would be some sort of media offloading with premium WordPress plugins to ensure robustness and regular updates, but that introduces complexity, so it’s something I will need to discuss with our developer.

But let’s say we do choose this very powerful server, you mentioned loading from the disk, but wouldn’t loading from RAM (given the excessive amount of RAM for this usecase) be preferable whenever available?