By John Engales CTO, Rackspace. Good presentation of the stages a typical successful website goes through: * Stage 1 - The Beginning: Simple architecture, low complexity. no redundancy. Firewall, load balancer, a pair of web servers, database server, and internal storage. * Stage 2 - More of the same, just bigger. * Stage 3 - The Pain Begins: publicity hits. Use reverse proxy, cache static content, load balancers, more databases, re-coding. * Stage 4 - The Pain Intensifies: caching with memcached, writes overload and replication takes too long, start database partitioning, shared storage makes sense for content, significant re-architecting for DB. * Stage 5 - This Really Hurts!: rethink entire application, partition on geography user ID, etc, create user clusters, using hashing scheme for locating which user belongs to which cluster. * Stage 6 - Getting a little less painful: scalable application and database architecture, acceptable performance, starting to add ne features again, optimizing some code, still growing but manageable. * Stage 7 - Entering the unknown: where are the remaining bottlenecks (power, space, bandwidth, CDN, firewall, load balancer, storage, people, process, database), all eggs in one basked (single datacenter, single instance of data).