Listen to the middle days of the first StackOverflow podcast and you'll hear that for a long time they ran StackOverflow on a single server. They were serving a million uniques with the web app and database running on a single box! It wasn’t even a very big box.
As a former .NET guy, I think the hosting part of deploying .NET wasn't well addressed by this post.
Jeff Atwood built and colocated a dedicated 2 or 3U server to run Stack Overflow. I certainly wouldn't call that an easy or recommended thing to do for a startup, especially if none of the founders have enough hardware and system administration experience.
Compare this to signing up for EC2, Linode, or Rackspace and spinning up a Linux instance to run Rails, Django, or Node. Even easier to just spin something up for free on Heroku. These are mature, solid solutions being used by many startups today.
There are a few providers like AppHarbor that are trying to make .NET hosting a bit more startup friendly, but there weren't any mention of those in this post.
As a former .NET guy, I think the hosting part of deploying .NET wasn't well addressed by this post.
Jeff Atwood built and colocated a dedicated 2 or 3U server to run Stack Overflow. I certainly wouldn't call that an easy or recommended thing to do for a startup, especially if none of the founders have enough hardware and system administration experience.
Compare this to signing up for EC2, Linode, or Rackspace and spinning up a Linux instance to run Rails, Django, or Node. Even easier to just spin something up for free on Heroku. These are mature, solid solutions being used by many startups today.
There are a few providers like AppHarbor that are trying to make .NET hosting a bit more startup friendly, but there weren't any mention of those in this post.