And that's why many indie projects fail before they start because people think they have to do something like this and build for scale before launch day :P

Half of all projects fail because they start with making a load balancer. The other half of projects fail because they become successful and don't have one.

Chick and egg problem with email providers. Prove you're not spam by having actual customers, then we'll allow you to send more than 100 emails.

So you're the reason I had to put numbers in my username, eh?

I know that pain of trying to get a very generic username all too well!

One of the Turbine devs shared that Asheron's Call (an early MMORPG) was intentionally not released in major outlets at first so they would not scale too fast. This was perhaps wise, the first few months were largely---and remarkably---free of network and load balancer problems.