rubyonrailsin

Hey everyone.

I'm a one person team and in the next month need to produce and deploy
an application. I've been playing with rails for a little over a year
now and recently deployed my first app as a private contract.

I'm now planning development on a start up company.

The app should be expecting high volumes (not like Twitter but high
for sure. Its no social media app) My target audience is very specific
but in certain locals the app has been requested by many users who are
in fact waiting for the app to deploy.

Smaller Volumes actually uploading files and adding objects to the db.
Many people surfing the site. (Probably the same sort of RATIOS as
cragslist (posters:readers, but not near the volume.)

My current plan is and I need some help with this:

Start on shared hosting unlimited traffic/storage. Will move to
dedicated-virtual if shared hosting causes performance issues when
traffic picks up.
Behavior Drive Development via RSpec & Cucumber.
Build the App in rails with ActiveRecord (I read somewhere
ActiveRecord can be swapped out for something faster, Should I use
something else?)
Use multiple MySQL databases 1 master for writing, at *least* 2 slaves
for reading. (Any info on this would be good.)
Run multiple mongrel instances via mongrel_cluster. (How many is
sufficient? I think currently I have 4 available on my hosting, can
upgrade later if needed. So that would be 1 main instance and 3
extras.)
Paypal via Active_Merchant for all payment processing. (May accept
money order and check but that's not app related.)
Amazon S3 services for file/image upload & hosting (Via paperclip.) I
may start by hosting all images from local server as I have unlimited
space but I feel as the app grows my hosting may not appreciate the
traffic and I'll move to Amazon S3.
Deploy via Git & Capistrano

I'm going to do all the base functionality for the application myself.
Get it running get people signed up get them using the app. Hopefully
the multiple db's and mongrel instances should supply enough speed to
start. At which point if everything goes as planned (it never does)
I'll outsource and get added security. Get queries optimized and work
on overall performance via back end processes etc that will be over my
head for sure hence the outsource or hire of private team. I know at
this point it will be necessary to do these things and costs for such
have been accounted for.

Any help with gathering resources where I can find more information
about the above topics or personal experiences would be greatly
appreciated.

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