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SQLite in production is a sound choice for small and mid-sized web applications once WAL mode is enabled, since concurrency on typical web loads improves by roughly two orders of magnitude. Litestream streams the WAL to S3-compatible object storage for point-in-time restore, and NVMe disks on cheap VPS plans removed the old disk objection.
Litestream is an open-source tool that replicates a SQLite database to an S3 bucket in near real time by reading the WAL SQLite already writes. It offers point-in-time recovery, overhead of only 1 to 3% CPU, and replaces the need for a separate database server in small apps.
SQLite in production is more viable than most teams assume. WAL mode removes read contention, Litestream replicates the WAL to S3 in near-realtime, and LiteFS adds multi-node replication. Without a separate database server, apps like Tailscale and PocketBase already do this in production. This article explains when it makes sense and its real limits.
