innovate big

surviving the crunch, it’s easy.

Of the many challenges a new web startup may encounter, crashing servers and maxed out infrastructure can be the most ideal and easy to overcome. Getting your site in front of the right people, on the other hand, is another challenge altogether.

Growing a new web startup is easy if your team has planned well and designed a robust, scalable (both up and down) platform based on proven technologies. Fortunately, today’s Internet technologies make this a piece of cake. At this point, most Internet technologies (web, mail, dns, etc.) have been worked and re-worked to support exactly that. Just a little planning will go a long way so that no re-architecture or overhaul is required to stay afloat once you’ve launched to the world. If budget is a top-priority this is especially important!

The must have basics for any scalable, web-based platform (regardless of the underlying application language):

1. keep things simple and stay nimble
2. use commodity hardware
3. use a tiered infrastructure that supports seamless horizontal scaling
4. use application source and deployment controls
5. implement monitoring for critical network, application and systems services
6. automate everything and stay as consistent as possible
7. use an application development strategy that is religious about testing (see also unit testing) and writing good code

(NOTE: The ability to scale down is magical especially for a new venture. When it’s so easy to scale up, it’s also quick and easy to go over budget too fast. Especially when additional resources can cost upwards of several hundred dollars per month.)