22 Recommendations for Building Effective High Traffic Web Software
Monday, December 16, 2013 at 8:54AM 
This is a guest post by Ashwanth Fernando, Software Engineer from the trenches at large scale internet companies.
Inspired by the book "Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch, I wanted to share my holistic recommendations on building high traffic web software (i.e. web applications/services that serve high traffic loads). Some of these items may not be just about software design but also around surrounding areas such as the engineering organization, culture etc.
Two disclaimers up front:
1) This is my opinion.
2) There will be real world situations where the below principles will be wrong as in all things "software". Please use common sense all the time.
Consider using more than one datacenter
There have been numerous horror stories about businesses, ahem going out of business because they just had a single datacenter. Its really important to have more than one data center if you want to protect yourself from natural disasters or electrical supply failures. Run all your datacenters in active-active configuration. It may cost extra money, but its well worth it rather than having an active passive configuration and then finding out at the end that for some pieces of data, your passive hardware was not consistent with the active one.
Consider a sparse datacenter deployment