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Not to mention, most startups either fail in 3 years or (hopefully) be in a position to pay for the extra servers.

It would be interesting to measure if the odds of failure somehow correlate with chosen technology stack.

Considering that most startups fail for reasons other than technical (running out of money, lack of traction, founders moving on) I don't think any correlation will be that meaningful. It will be interesting see a plot of the type of the startup (social, b2b, retail etc) versus the stack though :)

I am not so sure technology stack is entirely unrelated to failure rate. The stack you pick may influence iteration speed, hosting options, developer availability, uptime, reliability, security and costs.

Twitter would have failed had their scalability problems persisted.

In fact, I remember "Six Degrees". It was more or less Facebook, but in the late 90's. IIRC, they ran Cold Fusion on Windows.

You have a valid point there :)

Some say that Friendster failed mainly due to scaling issues. http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l...

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