One of the premier scaling strategies is always: get someone else to do the work for you. But unlike Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, you won't have to trick anyone into whitewashing a fence for you. Times have changed. Companies like Ning, Facebook, and Salesforce are more than happy to help. Their price: lock-in.

Previously you had few options when building a "real" website. You needed to do everything yourself. Infrastructure and application were all yours. Then companies stepped in by commoditizing parts of the infrastructure, but the application was still yours. The next step is full on Borg take no prisoners assimilation where the infrastructure and application are built as one collective. What you have to decide as someone faced with building a scalable website is if these new options are worth the price.