When it comes to crafting a platform for a new business, concept, or digital product, it's easy to find developers that claim they can build you the best system. Hit up oDesk or any freelancing site, and you'll probably find plenty of people at bargain prices. When you do, however, ask yourself whether it's worth building your entire business on a bargain when your goal is to do more or "scale up".

There's a great overview of what scalability really is over at InfoQ. For simplicity, scalability is the ability of your technology platform (which is a combination of your Web site and the physical infrastructure on which it runs) to do more. The more your platform can do, the more customers you're able to serve.

Now, let's get back to the original point: you can easily find a developer at a bargain price on any freelancing site. Unfortunately, we at Sol Minion Development often take over projects that were started from similar situations, but when it came time to grow or maintain the project over time, the project was unable to scale adequately. This inability to scale is the cost of the bargain and very often leads to paying more for a proper solution than if you had paid a professional to build it right the first time. Certainly, there are times when bootstrapping for minimal cost is necessary, but if you want your business to be sustainable you must make your platform scalable.

This isn't something that can be easily added later. As with security, scalability must be built-in rather than built on. On the technical side, your developer should be able to automate as much of the installation of the software as possible. There's a lot of techno-babble that goes along with this, but using configuration settings for separate environments to prevent manual entry and building assets when the application is deployed are just two elements that go into this planning process.

It's much easier to build scalability in the beginning than it is to try to take something thrown together by a bargain developer and make it scalable. As with everything in business, preparation is essential for success. If you're not sure whether your technology platform is scalable, contact us and we'll be happy to provide an analysis for you.