I wrote an app that served 290K customers with 727K data layer hits in the month it was relevant in the late aughts. It had a Python (v2, threaded) frontend, and a Perl + MySQL backend. I wrote it in two weeks, and the biggest lifts were the threading framework for the frontend and testing indexing schemes for the backend (MyISAM was intentionally chosen for read throughput and easy dataset swapping).
I built it to scale: the frontend could be hosted at any ISP and the backend could be run pretty much anywhere which could accept a TCP connection. The 727K data layer hits were served off of a DSL connection to a server running in my house.
But there were politics (literally) around the data. Whatever hosted the data had to be under control of identifiable meat.
In the end though, the data owners wouldn't clear me to distribute the data to other operators until it got to the point that the only way I could do so would have been to drive around with CDs (because there was no spare bandwidth on the DSL link).
You can call that a success or a failure, it's politics after all. But basically they didn't care, which is what they were never going to say.
I built it to scale: the frontend could be hosted at any ISP and the backend could be run pretty much anywhere which could accept a TCP connection. The 727K data layer hits were served off of a DSL connection to a server running in my house.
But there were politics (literally) around the data. Whatever hosted the data had to be under control of identifiable meat.
In the end though, the data owners wouldn't clear me to distribute the data to other operators until it got to the point that the only way I could do so would have been to drive around with CDs (because there was no spare bandwidth on the DSL link).
You can call that a success or a failure, it's politics after all. But basically they didn't care, which is what they were never going to say.