I have a more-or-less ignored site that I am intending to spend some time on in the coming year. The URL is http://www.Spain-Info.com.
Plans include extending the area guides to provide at least a stub on every city, village and dusty roadside crossroads in Spain (well, almost), to put in a links directory keyed to the topical areas of the site, and to add a lot of fresh content.
In some ways, Drupal obviously would be great. I'm guessing that someone who knows what they are doing could move the site to a couple of templates that would have to look better than the current site, with the CSS helping with the search engines. The forums are quite inactive, and even if they pick up a lot, the Drupal forum module would be more than up to the task. The capability for registered users to submit comments and articles is also a huge draw, as the site could work better in a lot of ways with some community.
Here's the question - if I do move it over, and expand the area guide to include hundreds of locales in Spain, add a directory with several thousand entries (which it would have if it just picked up the DMOZ listings) and expanded the other content with a couple of hundred extra pages, I am looking at a taxonomy tree with thousands of twigs on it.
Some of the posts on the forums made me think that when things get this complicated, Drupal gets slow and burdens the server. That would be a problem, because this site, and most of my other sites, are running on an anemic pentium server that does fine with the mainly static HTML I put on it now but which might drop to its knees if stressed unduly. I could, in theory, upgrade to a better server or servers, but I'm kind of cheap and the site does not make that much money, so I would prefer not to be pushed into buying a lot of shiny new hardware if other solutions would run with less overhead.