How a corporate entity reacts to crisis is important. Users expect official representatives to have frequent and forthright responses to crisis. Additionally, it is important that official representatives of the company do not make overly revealing or accusing remarks. It is rational for users to want 100% success rate in a company’s product or service. However, it may not be possible to deliver that promise. The reaction to service outages resulting from scaling must be handled in the same fashion. Acknowledge the error, inform the community of your actions to eliminate the error and any reoccurring symptoms, and continue to update the community on the status of the problem.
If your service is available to the public, then the service, free or not, should have a similar response to downtime. The user community may perceive a failure in your beta services as a reflection upon your production services.
Facebook faces some challenges during its continuing endeavors to scale. The user database is maintained in MySQL and the user interface is generated using PHP. Accordingly, Facebook contributes to open source projects which support these two software products. This is an interesting case of scale due to the fact that the developers at Facebook have access to the source. They can improve and repair problems with MySQL as the individual circumstance permits.
When Facebook decided to open another datacenter in Virginia, it was necessary to modify the MySQL code to stream modifications from one datacenter to the other. This was easily done with access to the source. Obviously, this would not have been a trivial task with a Microsoft product. Open source also carries the added benefit of the community contributing bug reports and fixes to the project.
Facebook and MySpace will both have to deal with scaling in the coming years if popular trends continue.
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?blog_id=company&m=12&y=2007
http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/10/03/myspace-vs-facebook-trends-and-numbers/
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/scaleout/scaleout_pitfalls.html