Jacob Rosenberg’s Blog

Successful web products don’t just grow, they grow explosively. If people love something about them, they’ll tell everyone they know about them, and they tell their friends, and before you know it, a product in stealth mode is getting used everywhere from Akron, Ohio to Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s around this time that just being on a couple of servers in a rack somewhere isn’t enough. It’s time for the next Big Step in the evolution of a web site’s scale. Today, I’m covering the “why” of Big Step 2, going multi-site. (more…)

Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition wrote an opinion piece in this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that the major print media (newspapers) should embargo their content for something like 24 hours before publishing it via online media sources. The thinking is that this would force people who wanted timely news to acquire it either via dead trees, or some sort of subscription service of the papers, which would bring them revenue and thus save the print establishment.

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As products get successful, they grow. For client applications that run on someone’s computer, this doesn’t necessarily represent a huge challenge: just make more CDs. For network applications in general, and web products in specific, this presents a different challenge. There are two distinct points in the growth of a web application which represent step functions in the level of complexity. I call these points the Big Steps. Today, I’ll cover Big Step 1, going multi-server.
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