Marco Arment

Because we were leasing dedicated servers, not managing the physical hardware ourselves.

When we started Tumblr (2006), we ran it from a single dedicated server at Rackspace that David already had from consulting work. (It was $800/month. Rackspace was expensive, but David valued their tech support as he was learning how to run servers.)

We stayed on one server for far too long, but Tumblr didn't have funding until late 2007! David was just paying for the server (and our salaries) with our consulting income.

We later added a second Rackspace server as a dedicated MySQL database for something like another $1200/month. Tumblr ran on just those two servers until March 2008! (It was stressful. This is when I learned how to run things cheaply and efficiently.)

In March 2008, we moved to six self-managed dedicated servers at ThePlanet (which later became SoftLayer).

From then until I left in late 2010, we scaled by just ordering more and more dedicated servers — first a couple at a time, but by the end, entire cabinets at a time.

When I left, we had a dedicated sysadmin so I wasn't managing the servers directly anymore (thank goodness — hi Andrew, if you ever see this!), but we had something like 130 dedicated servers, all in SoftLayer datacenters in Texas that we'd never set foot in.

Anyway, that's how.

The only thing Tumblr ever did in Texas was host a killer Rock Band party at SXSW as I hung out with Merlin Mann, Adam Lisagor, Michael Lopp, and John Gruber, all of whom I'd met for the first time earlier that day and they'd immediately welcomed me into their group as a peer, because they're all really good and friendly people. (It was a pretty significant day for me.)