"we just can allow for our service to break down because of an inflexible and limited initial architecture...when it grows, it will grow exponentially!" It's n

"we just can allow for our service to break down because of an inflexible and limited initial architecture...when it grows, it will grow exponentially!" It's not when, but if. The vast majority of startups never have that problem. Start out with something capable of handling the traffic from a Techcrunch article (maybe one or two visitors per second for a few hours). Spend a couple of hours thinking about how you would scale up and have a plan, but no more than that. Scalability can be very expensive so investing on it without knowing that you will need it is a case of premature optimization.