High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Robert Scoble in an often poignant FriendFeed thread commiserating PodTech's unfortunate end, shared what he learned about creating a successful startup. Here's a summary of a Robert's rules and why Machiavelli just may agree with them:

In Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications author Lei Zhu suggests a very interesting approach to load balancing: forget DNS round robbin, toss your expensive load balancer, and make your client do the load balancing for you. Your client maintains a list of possible servers and cycles through them. All the details are explained in the article, but it's an intriguing idea, especially for the budget conscious startup.

If you are a startup you may find useful Guy Kawasaki's post Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup. Part of any business plan are the projected guestimates. They are guestimates because everyone keeps these numbers hidden like a Swiss bank account. But not Redfin. They've bravely shared their initial cost projections, their actual numbers from real life, and the lessons they've learned from the discrepancy between the two...