I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive.
No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops.
and...
In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen.
I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun.
I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.