It's relatively simple to create a server that can handle the traffic as long as your app is something simple. The 10k users you're talking about I'm assuming is monthly active users (means they visit your site once or more per month) I have a website (yes a "web app") with 120k active users per month. It's running just fine on a relatively small server. To get users usually you need to give them something to come back to because they feel like it's something that they can't do without, maybe something that only you can provide, and something that makes them feel good and causes them to keep coming back to you to get their dose. If your question is more about technical details, then I'd just suggest not to worry about that until you have to, ie. your server is crapping out right before your eyes, that's a good problem to have. However, one mistake that I have made is to give up eventually on something that I may not see the immediate value in just b/c it's bit too difficult to maintain. So having said that don't waste a second optimizing something that no one's gonna end up using in 3 months. Everything else is really just noise.