Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable from t

Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable from the beginning so they don't have to re-architect it if it really does take off. Pragmatically, 99.99% of startups don't become Twitter and will manage fine with one DB server and one web server, especially if you use a compiled language and a commercial-grade database and nice hardware. And even if you become Twitter, well, they had terrible scaling problems, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them one bit.