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Comment by stephenou | Hacker News Reader

My advice is not to worry about scalability at this point. You can't really predict when and where your startup is going to gain popularity. Focus more on building a solid product, launch it, and you know what directions you are heading toward.

Imagine you waste 2 months of scaling your website that is only getting 100 users. I've experienced this before. Tears after all.

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stephenou,I'm aware of this short-sight. However, I am building a start up and putting a lot of resources into it. I do not want to plan for scale, per se, but I wanted to see if there were rough points I could actually keep in mind when developing, as opposed to just building a prototype. I'm used to use hacking things together with php and mysql, so I wanted to try to be a little more formal this time around.

Here's a few very rough tips:

1) Keep things as simple as possible. That means, for example, try and avoid database joins where-ever you can. Doing that would mean that in the future it's much easier to shard your databases and/or move to a different (eg, different database or NoSQL) solution.

2) Keep things stateless. State is always hard to scale.

3) Become an expert in tuning your database. Learn how to analyze queries and to create sensible indexes.

until you have users, how do you know which parts of your app are going to be the bottlenecks?

true. whenever Im building, (I know php and mysql), I always can get stuff to work, and make it work decently well, but i'm never sure if i'm doing stuff properly. I barely ever create OOP functions and hierarchies, etc. Does anyone else ever feel this way?

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