To what @lxo posted, because vertical scaling ("bigger servers") has its limits, the big #corpocentric #socnets split things up and use technological workarounds to appear to be one big server.

For example, one of the first things is to move the #database management system ( #dbms ) to a separate machine. Once this happens, hoizontally scaling the database by clustering (multiple servers handling the same db) is possible.

Next, we can perform similar clustering with the web server, and we can perform similar clustering at the processing layers.

Once we do this, we can expose things through various interfaces. This is what #cloud providers do with their separate compute, database, and storage services. Each such service relies on hundreds of servers pretending to be one.

Finally, we come to #federation, where we skip the pretense that everything is one big server and instead have many separate individuals and organizations running servers.

It isn't inherently more complicated, but it does mean users have to know that we're not all on big-centralized-server.com.