I've been thinking a lot about how to scale Quisition, the online flashcard site I'm working on in my "copious spare time".
Flashcard testing isn't a critical app but, given one of the features of Quisition will be its scheduling of what cards to review on which day, it's fairly important to users that the site is available daily.
Scaling I can mitigate somewhat by the number of users. I've been thinking my goal should be get 100 very happy users and then worry about the infrastructure to support 1000.
Given I'm thinking about these sorts of things, it was interesting to read Don't Scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart at Signal vs Noise. In particular, this quote is a nice confirmation of my current attitude:
Before you have users, it’s a waste of time ensuring that they can always get to the service
Some interesting comments have been made on the Signal vs Noise post. Thoughts welcome here too.