Dynamic content Web sites consist of a front-end Web server, an application server and a back-end database. In this paper we introduce distributed versioning, a new method for scaling the back-end database through replication. Distributed versioning provides both the consistency guarantees of eager replication and the scaling properties of lazy replication. It does so by combining a novel concurrency control method based on explicit versions with conflict-aware query scheduling that reduces the number of lock conflicts. We evaluate distributed versioning using three dynamic content applications: the TPC-W e-commerce benchmark with its three workload mixes, an auction site benchmark, and a bulletin board benchmark.We demonstrate that distributed versioning scales better than previous methods that provide consistency. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the bene.ts of relaxing consistency are limited, except for the conflict-heavy TPC-W ordering mix.