The website is built on Google App Engine in python. I feel that the general performance, success and maintainability of the finished product is a result of GAE's easy workflow, deployment and scalability. You really can save a whole bunch of time by not worrying about DB and hosting issues.
Of course using a big table and key-value DB vs a RDBMS has its drawbacks, we were able to work around the lack of joins, etc pretty quickly.
Overall we can see using GAE for future projects.
Cheers,
r.S.
