The main takeaway for me is that dedicated hardware is a nightmare when you have large traffic spikes. You could save a ton of stress by running this on a cloud platform with autoscaling, such as AWS or Heroku. You can always spin up a reserved instances on a long-term contract when you hit a certain baseline level of demand. And you should never consider dedicated servers or colocating until you hit that point.<p>AWS or Heroku could have easily handled the "freemium" traffic that would have crushed these servers, instead of only accepting paid users. And it sounds like that might have been a far more lucrative opportunity.