I love articles like this. Nice write up of your trial by fire.

Web server/application infrastructure architecture is what I do for a living, though I work in the lending industry, so we get far more traffic and serve bigger loads, but we also get multi-million dollar budgets which makes things a little more easy to approach. None the less, the growing pains, be it small app or large app, still suffer these same scaling issues as you grow and take on new traffic. It's always quite fun to deal with and I love it personally. The favorite part of my jobs are being involved in Sev issues that arise after new code is dropped, or we add a new service, or instance something off. That on the fly problem solving when you're under pressure is the reason I love my job.

My favorite quote, from a very talented Microsoft rep I trained with for a year, was "Heroics. Don't. Scale." He repeated this frequently, and with heart every time when my management would be like "We can't re-code that right now", "or we won't have those other servers in the farm for another quarter".

I always disagreed with him. Heroics do scale, it's just more difficult and you don't sleep as much. :)