Probably a mindset thing. Side projects are lottery tickets in my mind. Implementation of an interesting idea hoping for the remote chance that it might get act

Probably a mindset thing. Side projects are lottery tickets in my mind. Implementation of an interesting idea hoping for the remote chance that it might get actual traction (and become more than a side project) - at that point it needs scale and it needs to scale fast while people are talking about it. If you take another week rearchitecting your backend while your site is down, you lost your chance. So you shouldn't probably expect huge traffic, but make it ready for the traffic or there is no point if it will fail the moment it starts to get traction. My 3 side projects got reddit frontpaged (also here) and I got better at handling it. Fortunately I always had scale in mind (at peak got thousands of requests per second) but the first time was not a pleasant experience because I would have to pay more than I could if that kept going on. Fortunately I found a solution while keeping my site online and over the time the project paid me very handsomely. If I didn't plan ahead, those would be dead in the water.