Unfortunately, you usually won't know about those things unless you've been around for a while. The IT people and coders have to understand the visual image that the marketing and content people want, and why they want it. A former IBMer, in 1996 Ryan designed and managed the IT infrastructure behind the Atlanta Olympic Games, the first such games with a strong Web presence. As you'll see, he has strong views on enforcing baseline IT principles, the industry trend toward open source, and the value of personalization in customer retention. Our timing for scale is opposite that of a standard e-business.
Most companies scale over a period of weeks and months.
In contrast, most e-commerce shops scale during and across a single quarter so that there's more time to plan for increased traffic. We've had to build in an extremely robust, scalable architecture. We started with an approach that was similar to other Internet startups that are growing at compounded growth rates. That doesn't mean it's the right hardware, or that it's tuned for the application you're trying to run on it. It just means that you survive another day.