Server Side: I plan to copy those that scaled before me, a mixmash of: pinterest http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest-architec... , reddit: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables... , and instagram: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/16/instagram-architec... architectures.

The previous devs managed to get everything tightly coupled at the design stage, which is why I think their implementation efforts failed.

The plan for now is to seperate the existing code into layers and decide what to do from there.