Hi,
I've been a system admin for over 10 years focusing on web scale setups.
I have extensive experience with load balancers from NGINX and HAProxy to commercial solutions like Riverbed, content caching solutions like Varnish and Squid and database memory caching software like memcached.
I've split and scaled sites countless times to handle millions of hits per day that run on PHP, Ruby, Python with back-ends in MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and many others.
I'm based in San Francisco and regularly consult for startups in the area. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Kind Regards,
Mark.