True, but in this case with SQLite, there's unlikely to be much of a difference because there isn't the spare time available when waiting for a separate database server. I don't know what providers are good for a $10/month instance these days.

How are you spending any non-negligible time reading from SQLite at 12 requests per second though? That would mean you’re spending something like 50 ms per request on reading from SQLite.

Most of the time you're hitting SQLite, you're just reading from it, and so it doesn't hold anything up.