Congrats on your success...however, I have to point out something. When you said Rackspace, were you talking about Rackspace Managed Hosting (where you pay $1k/

Congrats on your success...however, I have to point out something. When you said Rackspace, were you talking about Rackspace Managed Hosting (where you pay $1k/mo in a yearly contract) ? Or were you referring to Rackspace Cloud (where you pay per usage) ? Either would work from a technical point of view, but I think the former reinforces the notion of premature optimization. In your case, it was absolutely worth it - but how many people are going to decide to use InnoDB and memcached and get a trickle of traffic ? Probably the vast majority. I think you did the right thing, went with what was best for you at the time and migrated as needed. Although, perhaps you thought it was crazy stressful, imagine if you signed a $15K yearly contract and Mashable and CNN never covered you and you never got that huge influx of traffic. So yes, in your case, if you had moved to those specific infrastructure stuff before getting that large spike in traffic, it would have made your situation much more bearable. But for everyone else, that there is no guarantee that they will get the traffic - I would caution against preparing for the best case scenario (when unfortunately the likely result will be a modest amount of traffic). Just my $0.02.