Scalability on a shoe string

Early stage companies often face the challenge of appearing reliable and scalable with minimal capital resources. You need to show an architecture for a system that can realistically support (and is realistically funded) your hockey stick projections on a shoe string budget. The architecture will have enormous effects on the ability (i.e. cost and time) to scale or increase reliability. Often the right strategy is to start with small, inexpensive load balanced components at every layer in the Internet Delivery Stack (see the Internet Delivery Stack Blog).  This enables lower up front investment and the opportunity to invest in smaller increments should the hockey stick not occur. Ultimately you get more reliability with better use of capital.