Chess.com is pay to win.
How. You play chess. Sure stuff is behind a paywall buuuuut you do not need to pay to win just play and get better. Read chess books do some lessons in other sites and come back later. It is THAT simple. You do not need to pay to play there is Ali and other players. For free. You can watch other people play chess. Free lesson every week. Daily puzzles. Plus clubs and stuff. So no, chess.com is not pay to win or pay to play.
chess.com could solve a lot of the site issues by using amazon web services and getting virtual servers. with aws you only pay for what you use. when the site is very busy virtual servers can be turned on and when there is less traffic they could turn the servers off and they would not pay for the time the servers are off. also it would help to use load balancers
If you visit the Jobs section in this site, you will find that they use state of the art techs currently available for Software Engineering, including AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, etc.