Howto Scale A Popular Site

O'Reilly Network: OSCON: Inside LiveJournal's Backend
open source rules!

LiveJournal started in 1999 with a shared server, which was promptly killed with too much traffic. The first dedicated server didn't fare much better, and from there Brad started collecting money from users to afford the hardware to host the service. Today LiveJournal is a colorful collection of 90 machines that employ a lot of fail over techniques and custom sofware bits that complement the off-the-shelf open source software that powers the rest of LiveJournal.

Rather than going into all of the details of Brad's talk -- go check out the PDF of his slides -- there is a lot of valuable information in there. If you find yourself hosting a web sites that is starting to push the boundaries of your current hardware, go read the slides.