Scalability depends on the particular solution. You can achieve scalability in many ways using many techniques.
We use state of the art hosting across a range of providers. From AWS to Digital Ocean. We have also scaled hardware solutions using Raspberry Pi's.
We are able to scale software applications vertically and horizontally. A cloud system that scales horizontally automatically creates new servers and computing power to cope with fluctuating demand.
A vertical scaling system typically has fewer servers and scales by increasing the hardware capacity.
Both options are valid and make sense depending on the scale. Horizontally scaling solutions increase the potentially for downtime as each new server can fail and therefore requires load balancing, also generally it can cost a lot.
However ultimately to achieve massive scale you will need a multi-server horizontal scale approach.
This is an area that is exploding in option at the moment with Amazon with AWS, Google and Microsoft with Azure and IBM all entering the market with custom solutions.
Whilst some solutions aid rapid initial development and scale the costs of such services also scale and often sometimes not linearly! It can also be very challenging to understand what your monthly hosting charges will be.
It is also important to know where your data is stored. If third party services are used in an effort to rapidly enter the market its important to also consider a failover plan and not get locked in to any one provider.
Newicon has always championed open source technologies. Open source operating systems and programming languages dominate the cloud internet space. We work with you and factor in the projects specifics to develop a sensible scaling plan.