In his case, it sounds like a fairly small website developed by just himself. Sorry if I'm not going to take this advice too seriously until this is disproven.
Simple is good - it's mature, it's easy to understand, it's easy to optimize, and it works. And you don't need to spend a bunch of time and make a bunch of mistakes learning it.
Scale: 120+ million people a month.
Stack: IIS + SQL Server + MongoDB, glued together almost exclusively with C#. The only part of my stack that's remotely cool is MongoDB, and I only use it on a little bit of my platform and I outsource it to MongoHQ.
The hard part of any new technology is bouncing back when things go wrong, and I don't have to do that now that a 3rd party does it for me, which brings me back around to Simple again.
There's a whole bunch of stuff I would like to learn but the reality is I can't have my startup falling over every time I fumble through learning something new, especially when what I already know can still solve problems.
> The [Pinboard] fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.
The current price is $9.22, so following this formula he has ~9220 users, which has paid him roughly 42K. He also charges $25 (minus your sign up fee) for archiving, which would bump that number up a bit.
I want the freetext search, but don't need to be able to access the archived page (except for the equivalent of Google's text cache if the remote page is down).
So yes I want archiving, but I don't need asset archiving for things like the images, css, javascript on the pages. And yes I realise for a lot of hashbang sites this would break, but that's just dandy with me.
I could sign up to the archiving, but with over 1,700 bookmarks I hesitate... will it go and download all of them? I think that's creating a burden on your service so I am not upgrading. I'd even pay the same price, or damn near it, as the full archiving, but I really want to get the fulltext search in a guilt-free way.
It comes down to this - storage is cheap and development time is expensive. It would take considerable work to retrofit the crawler to only fetch dependencies for certain users, manage the case where they upgraded/downgraded between levels, and so on.
It saw a huge influx of users the day the delicious end-of-life-ing was announced, and held up admirably.
As someone who works (during the day) for a government agency with well over a million employees, this is something I understand well. Granted, we're not Twitter - but we do serve a silly amount of data using old-fashioned and "boring" technology, and we're glad that we use it because it's proven itself to be reliable.
This is rather insulting to two groups of people: people that are working on things this author would not think are interesting, and people who are overcoming technical challenges by deciding to use new, less mature tools since things like the LAMP stack have well known limitations. (the overlap of these people, as you can probably guess, is pretty high.)