>if there is some way that you architect your program so that you can easily scale across multiple servers (and not just have multiple instances of the program

>if there is some way that you architect your program so that you can easily scale across multiple servers (and not just have multiple instances of the program on multiple servers) See this article: http://highscalability.com/unorthodox-approach-database-design-coming-shard http://highscalability.com/unorthodox-approach-database-desi... In fact, see that whole site. There's a lot of stuff there.