Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks

One Million Checkboxes (OMCB) is a website that scaled from a few expected users to over 650 million checks within days. The architecture involved using Redis for state management, nginx for static content and reverse proxy, and Flask for API handling. The site faced several challenges including unexpected high traffic, Redis connection issues, and bandwidth costs. Solutions included adding more servers, batching updates, using a connection pool, and eventually rewriting the backend in Go, which significantly improved performance. The project emphasized learning and fun over perfect solutions, leading to valuable scaling insights.