Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about. Worry about the business model. If you get the business model right, and you have scalability problems (i.e. "Oh shucks there are too many people trying to pay me money!"), then you can just pay to get them resolved.

View on HN

Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices. My current product is paid, and I have contemplated making it free while trying to catch the revenue off the ads, but given that scaling the web site will take work now whereas the ad payback may or may not come later I chose not to do this.

"... Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices ..."

To the point where you have trouble getting more users. MySpace is the classic study here. How do they scale all those windows servers? ~ http://www.baselinemag.com/index2.php?option=content&tas...

This is only a problem if your business model is based around selling poorly performing lower-than-remnant-inventory CPM advertising to users who are largely a) poor and b) disdainful of spending money except on iPods, which famously do not need CPM advertising to reach your users.

Not to toot my own horn here, but my (very, very boring) website makes about ~$80 for 1,000 pageviews. It is built on Rails. Supposing I totally screwed the pooch and it was structurally incapable of doing more than 100k page views a day without a top-to-bottom rewrite.

Suppose I got to that $8,000 revenues a day and figured "You know what? This is too darn constraining. I WANT MORE, BWAHAHAHA". I'd be able to hire whomever I pleased to do the rewrite (pay $5k a day for my own ops team, who cares, I can afford it). And it would be vastly easier scaling my site than Myspace/Twitter can scale theirs, because I would not have to set world engineering records to do so.

The first response any engineer is going to make is "Erm, you should probably think of putting multiple web servers in front of a beefy database rather than running both web server and database out of a machine with 256 MB of RAM." This is a pretty easy engineering problem compared with "OK, innovate technologically to be able to handle data on a scale that 5 years ago would have required a major multi-national corporation or minor nation state to generate."

Then I'd be back to the boring-as-dust business of, you know, providing features to convince my customers to continue paying me money.

I modded you up because I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I think you're being a bit unfair.

Assuming your $80 CPM site is the one in your profile (if it is, what does it use Rails for? edit: nevermind, just read your blog post about your cron bug :p), then it's not very surprising, since it offers a product for download. What would happen if your product made more sense as an online service? If you charged the same price and got the same number of sales, how much would it make per 1,000 pageviews? It would still be a lot more than advertising revenue, but nowhere near $80 CPM.

Just make sure you hire the right people. This appears to have been Twitter's problem, and it took them awhile to fix it.

Experience counts.

This is true at some point but can be dangerous if you neglect it entirely. I have worked as server admin as a part-timer in a company that stalled because they don't use grid technology for their shared plan right from beginning. We have clients complaining the server response and lots of problems with I/O etc. Converting this 500~ shared servers into grid system is painful to do when we have limited time and resources. But, this problem would less occur if we have chosen a slightly expensive but reliable for the long run grid system or the like.

That may be right, but if you build expecting the scalability problem AND you get masses of users, you can swim in the money instead of using it to solve the problem.

McScrooge approves this message.

>Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about.

That's what friendster thought too.

Friendster became very popular but couldn't handle the scalability part and ended up dying a slow and painful death...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com