

Ask HN: What do you wish you knew about scaling when your start up was small? - ciguy

I&#x27;m writing a book for founders and early stage engineers who want to know how to set up a website&#x2F;app correctly so it can scale later on.<p>What are some things you wish you knew before your start up took off? Could be tools to use, best practices or even things you wish you hadn&#x27;t done. I&#x27;m hoping to keep things light enough that even a technical but non-engineer founder would benefit from reading it.<p>If you&#x27;d like an update when the book is ready you can sign up here: www.startopsbook.com
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dawson
I wish I _hadn 't_ thought about scaling when my [last] startup was small.

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ciguy
I've head this, or some version of this from a number of people that I've
asked. Premature scaling can definitely be an issue and that's something I'd
like to cover in the book.

There are definitely things that can be done, not necessarily requiring any
extra effort, that can alleviate scaling problems down the road though.

What sort of things specifically scaling related did you do that you now wish
you hadn't?

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bemmu
"Alter table" can take a pretty long time on mysql if you have enough rows.
Missed some ad revenue because of this, but it would have been a lot worse to
try to make everything perfectly scalable from the start.

