I'm not sure how well the architecture described in the article lends itself to horizontal scaling since everything assumes it's on the same machine (I think?).

I'm not sure how well the architecture described in the article lends itself to horizontal scaling since everything assumes it's on the same machine (I think?). Granted, if you build for horizontal scaling I agree, a client/server database is the way to go. As for backups, SQLite also supports backups while another process is using the database.