Yfrog uses HBase as its scalable database backend to store and serve 250 million photos from over 60 million monthly users across 4 HBase clusters ranging from 50TB to 1PB in size. The authors provide best practices for configuring and monitoring HBase, including using smaller commodity servers, tuning JVM garbage collection, monitoring metrics like thread usage and disk I/O, and implementing caching and replication for high performance and reliability. Following these practices has allowed Yfrog's HBase deployment to run smoothly and efficiently.