I need to create a web form to collect user data (survey) that is expected to peak at 100-200k concurrent users, maybe more. I'm more experienced with Java & PHP solutions with RDBMS for persistence, and with those platforms I'd need a ton of VMs and serious hardware load distribution to handle this kind of traffic.
Since this might not be cost effective, I'm flirting with the idea of node.js and possibly a message queue or a NoSQL data store.
Has anyone faced this problem and tried a similar solution?