I ran into the same situation multiple time and was never able to find a solution besides throwing more money at servers. That might be due to my own lack of knowledge about running servers and performance optimization as I was (and still am) a front-end person first and foremost.
This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misused quotes I know of. It doesn't mean what people think it means, yet I hear it misapplied at least a few times every year.
(The quote has to be understood in its original context. It isn't really about performance as such, but about maintaining degrees of freedom and development flexibility until you understand the problem you are solving and can commit)
