Why the downvote? The up/down or a 0-10 scale is a UX choice in the voting mechanism, but I am not sure how that is a major differentiator.
Feedback: Since your intention is to recommend relevant items you might want to optimize the referrer experience. It took a lot of clicks to go selecting a list to accessing the relevant content. E.g it took me 3 clicks to find http://www.listnerd.com/item/savant-1, and then I gave up on finding the artists music or a link to it on that page. On bagcheck it takes 1 click to access the relevant referral link.
It sucks to be the alpha tester. However, the SQL vs NoSQL debate is silly, because Facebook seems to be using both to scale.
A lot of content at Facebook seems to be served from a denormalized NoSQL storage and that is the useful takeaway insight. I do not know what I can learn from the fact that a team with some of the most talented SQL ops and developers can store some core data in SQL.
We are hosting our blog on WPEngine and you guys increased the response speed of our blog a lot compared to other hosting providers! We used to spend hours maintaining the blog and make sure it runs reliably, and deploying a new version used to be scary in the absence of a checkpoint mechanism, but you guys solved this problem well.
I can understand that the customer is frustrated with having to change his code to move from a VPS environment to a cloud environment, but that is the unfortunate truth when scaling. Either you 1) get closer to the real hardware and throw resources at it (more ram, vps, or dedicated machine) or 2) change your code to be horizontally scalable on light cloud instances.
Maybe this is chance to create a help-page that explains to users what resource limits they should stay below (memory, cpu, queries) to handle peaks in traffic and how to identify problem points (bad SQL queries, hungry plugins).
Feedback: Since your intention is to recommend relevant items you might want to optimize the referrer experience. It took a lot of clicks to go selecting a list to accessing the relevant content. E.g it took me 3 clicks to find http://www.listnerd.com/item/savant-1, and then I gave up on finding the artists music or a link to it on that page. On bagcheck it takes 1 click to access the relevant referral link.