Many of us are familiar with website such as Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, Netflix, and the like. We are accustomed to visiting them at all hours of the day and night. We use them to share our photos, news, and personal information. We rely on them to stay up to date with our friends and interests. We leverage them to make online purchases during our busiest of days. Last but not least, we spend our R&R being entertained by cloud-streamed movies on 320-by-480 pixel screens. Such is our dependence on these services that any interruption is met with uproarious headlines that spread at epidemic speeds. Using examples from LinkedIn, Netflix, and eBay, we'll look at some common causes of outages and scaling issues. More importantly, we will look at modern best practices in availability and scaling in web sites today.