>>evanwe+(OP)
What frameworks would you use to handle such an steep growth curve? Most startups I know of start of with rails or the like - and obviously they couldn't handle the strain. So what would you use?
>>lunchb+Ex
The JVM. I know this is the boring answer but the tooling and performance combination is tough to beat. It's why Twitter themselves switched to the JVM (a mix of Scala and Java).