tl;dr: SQLite can handle production web workloads on modern NVMe hardware if you tune it beyond defaults: enable WAL mode with `synchronous=NORMAL`, set a `busy_timeout`, use `BEGIN IMMEDIATE` for write transactions to avoid deadlocks, and increase `cache_size` and `mmap_size` to keep the working set in memory. For durability in ephemeral cloud environments, pair it with VFS-based replication tools like Litestream or LiteFS. It's a strong fit for read-heavy apps under a few hundred GB, but PostgreSQL still wins for distributed multi-region writes or terabyte-scale datasets.