Coding Horror: My Scaling Hero
Jeff giving props to the PlentyOfFish guy and his scaling awesomeness. The money quote on both blogs:
The problem with free is that every time you double the size of your
database the cost of maintaining the site grows 6 fold. I really
underestimated how much resources it would take, I have one database table now that exceeds 3 billion records. The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to
service a visit. via
Still, he has managed to build PlentyOfFish on just a handful of servers, maybe I should look into .Net.
Also Check out this look at PlentyOfFish's architecture.
Update June 24, 2009: Jeff just wrote a piece on "scaling up" vs. "scaling out" that also uses Plenty of Fish as the example.