For a true side project (as in: I'm probably going to forget about it in a couple weeks and let it fade away), I don't bother with any of that. If it's a profe

For a true side project (as in: I'm probably going to forget about it in a couple weeks and let it fade away), I don't bother with any of that. If it's a professional project in any sense (as in: something I'm being paid to do) I'll at least route the DNS to a load balancer, and I'll use some kind of hosted RDS or NoSQL service for the DB. That's kind of the bare minimum effort (just in case the client is right about the product getting a million hits on the first day...). But for 99% of side-projects, you can build and refactor for scaling concerns after you've done practically everything else. Scaling is the ultimate "Champagne Problem".