business mailing list today:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003752014_brier18.html
"Within the next five hours we had another 30,000 users join and then we
started hitting the 10,000-users-an-hour pace, which was 10 times faster
than the first 10 hours," he said. "Then we realized we needed to start
rethinking things."
...
While the engineers rebuilt, the president and chief executive
"shucked" the
150 servers they rounded up - stripping boxes and hooking them up at the
data center.
Just to point this out, if they had built their technology around the
concept of deploying virtual servers, they could have just expanded
by renting more nodes on EC2, or just bought picked up more hosts
from one of the other hosting providers.
Buying hardware creates a sunk cost, I suspect most startups can come
up with more creative ways to spend their cash.
If you are looking for an overview of how to Scale Out, check out the
"12 days of Scaleout":
http://mysql.com/why-mysql/scaleout/
The stories that are being posted are not for the die hard technical
scale out folks, but I suspect anyone looking over the articles will
come away with a few ideas.