How I built an app with 500,000 users in 5 days on a $100 server

Ah yes, the beauty of hardware instead of dragging a slider to the right.

In all seriousness, I wish a lot more developers would spend some time to learn about hosting and its options, instead of heading straight for "the cloud" or some PaaS/IaaS. This doesn't mean a developer needs to be devops, but instead understand their options.

That's not to say that PaaS/IaaS doesn't have its place, because it certainly does. But the majority of developers would simply throw some thing on Heroku, and continue dragging that slider to the right until NewRelic stops freaking out.

I wonder if this developer found any way to monetize on the success of his app.