Comment by hamburglar

I was part of a small team that built a $300M company on Ruby and MySQL that made every scaling mistake you can possibly make. This was also the right decision because it forced us to stay lean and focus on what we needed right now, as opposed to getting starry-eyed about what it was going to be like when we had 10 million users. At every order of magnitude, we had sudden emergencies where some new part of the system had become a bottleneck, and we scrambled like crazy to rearchitect things to accommodate. It was hard, and it was fun. And it was frugal. We eventually hit over 10 million users before I left, and I can’t say I regret the painful approach one bit.