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1 to 100 is easier than 100M to 250M (made up numbers, but you get the point).

it depends on what you have to scale, if this is just php rendering, this is still relatively easy to do.

As an extreme, can you imagine if Facebook doubled its usage in a week? It depends on what the site does and what floor it's starting from.

We (Khan Academy) are certainly not at Facebook's scale, but we do run a site with a lot of dynamic behavior and millions of monthly users. If we had our own bare metal in data centers, we either would have been way overprovisioned or would have been scrambling to keep up.

You mean like scaling from 1 user to 100 users?

No, something like 1,000 to 100,000