In a new post Justin Carmony looks at what it means to me a "middle-scale website" and has some recommendations for anyone working with their applications and considering things like scalability, overcompensation and finding real results through profiling.

Hopefully at some point, your website is going to get a lot of traffic. Yay, you’ve reached your goal of getting good traffic, but it is soon followed by issues with performance and load. I like to call these the growing pains of a website. So as a web developer, I suddenly have the epiphany of "Hey, I need to scale my website!" What follows next is the biggest mistake a web developer can make: They start looking at articles on how Google scales, or maybe how Facebook manages all of their traffic. This is a mistake! To be brutally honest, you are not Google. You are not Facebook. You are not Twitter. You are a website that receives less than 0.000001% of the traffic that some of the major websites receive.

He includes a "reality check" of the setup behind a popular social site, StackExchange, with comments from their own post about their infrastructure. He talks about things included in a move to "middle-scale" like adding caching, performance tweaking, moving to a multiple server model and using replication.