I think that trying to gauge user load for a startup is about as accurate as figuring out the financials five years in advantage.
There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-yourself Amazon S3.
In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server, factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.
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I think that trying to gauge user load for a startup is about as accurate as figuring out the financials five years in advantage.
There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-yourself Amazon S3.
In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server, factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.