Scaling Your PHP Internet Website

There has been a lot of talk about people making money on Internet-facing websites that generate income solely from Google AdSense revenue and provide free content. Sounds nice, and if you're a budding web developer, or have done several web apps in an office, and know a little Linux and some web language, you might be the perfect fit to get something like this off the ground. But how do you scale?

I've heard people talk about using Shared Memory, but personally I find that to be unsuitable for most situations and by then you've locked up memory that could have been used to scale in more users. I've heard talk about using multiple servers to scale the traffic across, and indeed that makes sense eventually when you have the cash to host the stuff yourself with your own private fractional T1 line to your budding business. However, there's another way, and that's to use cheap offshore labor in India and Brazil to rewrite the slower parts of your project in GC++ so that they are optimized for speed. So if it were me, and I were just starting out, I'd just focus on making the website as fast as I could with the language you know, and keeping eyeballs there, and then when things are cramped and you need more speed, look for offshore India or Brazil coders to help you convert some of your functions into GC++. And when you get the first opportunity to introduce fractional T1's and host the stuff yourself, then sure, go look to build a web, app, or database farm.