its not quite that bad really. unless you are scaling amazingly fast, like say twitter did, usually you get site slowness that you can troubleshoot and fix, not a completely busted website.
my suggestion is to read some books/websites on the subject, and make sure you architect early to accomodate scaling later.
Comments
Design for 10x scale to start with.
Wait until your site goes down due to unanticipated bottlenecks.
Fix bottlenecks.
Repeat.
So essentially, you learn by failing? that used to get you killed in the caveman age, and these days, that tends to get you fired.
These are the sorts of things that you have to learn via 2nd hand experience i reckon.
its not quite that bad really. unless you are scaling amazingly fast, like say twitter did, usually you get site slowness that you can troubleshoot and fix, not a completely busted website. my suggestion is to read some books/websites on the subject, and make sure you architect early to accomodate scaling later.