- you could vertically scale - but as described, hardware limits mean a single server can't serve a large userbase - it's a single point of failure which is bad - so we often horizontally scale, where we do [[Database Partitioning]] which involves multiple [[Databases]] https://youtu.be/FxAom29OEKE?si=5M90zFOXnOPN2l_3 https://bytebytego.com/