Managing the amount of visitors... [closed]

Question

Here at SO there's a lot of focus on designing web applications but I seem to be missing something in all these discussions. It seems as if everyone is focusing the design of their site to allow lots and lots of visitors to visit it, thus putting a huge strain on the server. But what if someone is designing a site just for friends and family? Or just an in-house site that's just for the 500 employees of a company? While it's all web design, there's still a huge difference in designing sites like Google Search or StackOverflow and sites like www.geocities.com\alex\myfamilyhistory.html or something similar. (Wow, I remember Geocities. I must be old!)

So, my question is simple: when designing a new website, where would be the most important differences between managing a site for 50 visitors, 5000 visitors and 500.000 visitors per day?

(Well, hardware-wise, just add more servers. But I'm focusing here on software design only!)

Answer 1

Software-wise, you should always think your design and architecture through not to limit yourself with any abstract visitors limit.

Use commonly-known best-practices. Avoid costly string operations. Create a decent database schema. Put indexes and clustered indexes where appropriate. Avoid quick-hacks based on the consolation that nobody will notice because you don't have that many visitors yet.

Then when the time comes, you will discover you only need to get more hardware instead of completely rewriting your application.