I have some other thoughts (if the platform domain which the site uses can logically allow for this kind of behavior)… First, consider using sub domains to reduce and distribute the network stress and load.

By grouping functions which can logically break over sub domains, you can use 1 or 1000 computers in 1 or more networks to support your site and you can scale up as you see fit simply by modifying your DNS host files.

I note, looking at my address bar right now, that Pingdom itself seems to use this very technique. A technique that, if implemented properly, can be a really useful tool in making sure a site stays (or at least parts of a site stay) online through proper load management.

So, how could you make that work in an example? Let’s say you had a domain like example.com to launch your next great site. Say that your site had a signup process which required some additional horsepower from a system to do whatever you needed to make the signup work for your site and that similar resources or load might be needed in a login scenario. You could setup a Join.Example.Com for registration and a Login.Example.Com for logging into your site.

While I won’t bore you with details, it is conceptually pretty straight forward to do this on multiple machines. If you plan for this at the outset of your site launch, it may save you headaches as your site scales and you discover that you need to distribute function load processing over multiple machines or networks.

Next of course, you will also need to pay attention to the bandwidth if your site is heavily network I/O intensive (e.g., download site). I think more often than not, new sites (which are not static and who does those these days?) will face CPU, memory and disk I/O challenges (e.g., database) before they hit network bottlenecks.

One final (and I think a rather important) thing. Be sure to educate your users on why you are doing what you have done to help them with a better user site experience with sub domains. Be very sure to point out that they should never confuse the sub domain with someone using the primary domain as a sub domain, as is the case when so called “phishing” sites attempt to attack your site. In other words make it very clear to your users that:

this.example.com this.example.com.badguys.tld

Really finally, much good luck with your new site launch – when you bring something useful online, hopefully so many others will want to participate in your new project that you will really need this advice!