This should not apply to such heavy weight companies, but if you're little application suddenly becomes an overnight success you will have trouble scaling it.

This should not apply to such heavy weight companies, but if you're little application suddenly becomes an overnight success you will have trouble scaling it. The easiest step would be to store your static data on a commercial CDN. There isn't much logic running. If you would set up one yourself you would use a webserver that is extremely fast at serving static content. The only "thinking" part of the chain would probably be a load balancer. You're server is now somewhat outside of the boundaries your application server "creates" and deleting old data requires new functionality (although storing too). Functionality that might not readily exist in the framework you use. If the whole thing is growing too fast for you to keep up you might say to yourself "This and that is now far more important, have the data lying around for a while, it's too much work for now".