bump for this awesome list, especially highscalability I don't know where OP's experience level is at, but I think there's no substitute for direct experience.

bump for this awesome list, especially highscalability I don't know where OP's experience level is at, but I think there's no substitute for direct experience. Running, debugging, performance testing a remote server is an art all its own. If you don't have much industrial experience with this, I'd suggest getting hold of the source code of some site that you know scales ( http://code.reddit.com/ http://code.reddit.com/ ) and then going on EC2 and use some performance testing tool ( http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ ) to check it out.