What’s the Best Way to Scale a Website for 10,000-50,000 Users?

Just to chime in, if your concern is about massive sites like Facebook or YouTube, you're looking at some complex distributed systems. Check out terms like CAP theorem, database sharding, and load balancing. These concepts will be super helpful in understanding how high-traffic environments operate.

Throwing hardware at a problem can work wonders! We once ran an entire team of about 400 users on a super old server with just 4MB of RAM, but modern servers can handle much more. The key is to monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and fix them gradually. You might not find a ton of practical resources because most people operating at that scale are just busy keeping it alive!

Handling 50,000 concurrent users is definitely possible with the right setup! First off, invest in a good server and choose an efficient runtime. It’s not as impossible as it sounds—modern servers are super powerful. Plus, consider using a CDN for all your static content to ease the load on your primary server.

You should definitely get familiar with asynchronous programming, cloud infrastructures, and load balancing. Think about how to scale out versus scaling up too; it makes a huge difference in performance. Containerization is another essential topic to explore!