Khanacademy is great and don't get me wrong, but what I see is an engineering blog that doesn't force HTTPS and an ad for Google products. All that Khanacademy did was optimize code, setup the partner console properly and pay the (likely enormous) bill. As I read in another comment here: "How to scale: Make it somebody else's problem" + pay the bill.

Edit: ah, a case study from Google about Khanacademy. This post was definitely an ad: https://cloud.google.com/customers/khan-academy Another: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/08/khan-academy-ru...