As I forwarded the link to the article "Inside MySpace: The Story" for the umpteenth time to someone who is waking up to the fact that their home-grown social networking site is growing and it's time to plan ahead, I realized it was time to blog about it.

As I summarized in this latest email: "MySpace kept growing and hit milestones where they knew they were technically [hosed]* and had to rearchitect. They did it over and over until they finally went with a grown-up enterprise solution."

The article is prefaced by this list of MySpace milestones where you can see they were forced to re-think their architecture and back-end technology over and over again as they grew in a way that nobody had ever dreamed of.

Membership Milestones:

1. 500,000 Users: A Simple Architecture Stumbles
2. 1 Million Users:Vertical Partitioning Solves Scalability Woes
3. 3 Million Users: Scale-Out Wins Over Scale-Up
4. 9 Million Users: Site Migrates to ASP.NET, Adds Virtual Storage
5. 26 Million Users: MySpace Embraces 64-Bit Technology
6. What's Behind Those "Unexpected Error" Screens?

What's especially interesting about the article is that it's aim is not to just tell the interesting story, but to present a case study for others to learn from. Go learn!

*original email used a more colorful adjective ;-)