This is a story of one of my first product launches. And inevitable rewrites that ensued. You can read more of it here: <a href="https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/05/my-first-product.html" rel="nofollow">https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/05/my-first-product.h...</a><p>Years ago I was building SEO software. One of the products was originally written as an internal tool, and handled our work load without skipping a beat. Then we decided to release it to the public, so I did a small refactor to implement accounts. We launched with it on hosted on a small Dell PC under my desk (where it had been running as our internal tool). Within 2 hours of launch, it was completely overwhelmed and shutting down due to overheating.<p>It was "rewrite" time.<p>While doing that, I had to come up with SOME work around. So I opened the case and stuck a box fan on it to try and exhaust some of the heat. That lasted about 8 more hours. Before the server shut down, and I got a call from the boss.<p>I went in to the office in the middle of the night, and started profiling the application. I found a VPS host, quickly spun up their largest Windows VM they offered, and that helped for a few days while I rewrote large swaths of the application. Even after a ~80% rewrite and splitting the application in two, we had more users that we'd ever anticipated and I was out of my depths with scaling. So we got a few (much larger) physical servers at Softlayer.<p>This was the setup that this website ran under for the next couple of years with minor tweaks, more space with an iSCSI array, more RAM, migrating to a more CPU, etc, but all staying at Softlayer. Eventually when the hosting bill was getting into the high four figures a month, we reevaluated and decided a rewrite was in order to switch it to Microsoft Azure utilizing Azure SQL, Azure Table Storage, Azure Queue Service, and offloading all of the complicated tasks from the web server onto the Azure infrastructure. For all I know it is still on Azure.