High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

All the cool kids advocate scaling out as the secret sauce of scaling. And it is, but don't forget to serve some tasty "scaling up" as a side dish. Scaling up doesn't have to mean buying a jet propelled, liquid cooled, 128 core monster super computer. Scaling up can just mean buying at the high end of the commodity buffet by buying more cores, more memory and using a shared nothing architecture to take advantage of all that power without adding complexity. Scale out when you need to, but big beefy boxes can absorb a lot of load before it's necessary to hit up your data center for more rack space. Here are a few examples of scaling out and up:

Eventually every database system hit its limits. Especially
on the Internet, where you have millions of users
which theoretically access your database simultaneously,
eventually your IO system will be a bottleneck. [A] promising but more complex solution with nearly no scale-out limits is application partitioning. If
and when you get into the top-1000 rank on alexa [1], you have to think about such solutions.

A Quick Hit of What's Inside

Horizontal application partitioning, Vertical application partitioning, Disk IO calculations, How to partition an entity