They start out with a great idea and they build a proof of concept site. It works great and the beta users love it. But what happens when it’s opened up to the masses? It’s difficult to predict where and when an application will hit a wall. What are the bottlenecks? How much should be budgeted for infrastructure and how soon will it be needed? What lies ahead?

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the popularity of social networking on the rise, application architects and developers are under pressure to scale their infrastructure to keep up with demand. This can be a daunting task given that they are also under pressure to help launch the business, deliver new features and functionality, fix bugs, hire new employees, keep up the blog, and still maintain some semblance of a life.

Many developers develop their applications without thinking about how the application will scale beyond a few hundred users. They tend to think in terms of functionality first…scalability can come later.

Over the last six years at Rackspace, John Engates has witnessed hundreds of customers go through many of the same challenges as they scale their apps. He's identified seven distinct stages that most companies go thorough as they scale up. In this session, he’ll walk through the seven stages of scaling a web application and discuss what to expect in each stage. And he’ll also provide best practices that will help ANY developer or startup business owner as they get ready for the onslaught of traffic that lies ahead.