Seconded. Start with a single box. You're not Facebook. The success of your startup won't depend on whether you have an unplanned downtime of 15 minutes once a

Seconded. Start with a single box. You're not Facebook. The success of your startup won't depend on whether you have an unplanned downtime of 15 minutes once a month during your first year. If your product is any good people will retry after an hour and not switch to your competitor. If you hit scalability issues go for a hybrid model where you make the resource intensive part scalable. But hey if you think you need to start out with webscale, have two dozen micro services and an exploding number of failure states between them and blow through your VC money with an AWS bill before the first customer signs up, more power to you.