Growth for your website
Every business and website owner wants nothing more than to grow. It is always desirable to watch it grow and have more people enjoy and engage with your content is the desired effect of running a site.
Having a website that grows slowly but continuously over time is the ideal scenario, but it is not always the way it is going to go. It is more likely that it is choppy and maybe only focused at specific times or part of your site.
If you are running something like an a store, then you might have increased traffic during specific times like around holidays, black Friday or something, but won’t need the same amount of room for traffic during other parts of the year. If you run a website for a restaurant, then it might be centered around the weekend or something like that.
Growth in terms of the internet can be unexpected or constantly changing and you might need a plan that is flexible for your current needs.
It is important to plan scalability into the creation and the continues maintenance of your site.
What is scalability?
There are two parts of growth on your website. Like most website issues exists both in the front- and backend parts. So, when you think about scalability it is also important to think about it for all aspects.
One thing is creating more pages, for more products, or upscaling your storage and capacity for your business and another is upgrading all of the features, that keep your site running.
User-experience is an important part of running a store and as you get more traffic it will be harder for your site to run smoothly, if it doesn’t have the necessary bandwidth to do this for the number of people who want to access it.
Aspects you need to consider
Hosting
A good hosting provider and plan is important for your site to grow. More traffic might mean you need to up your hosting plan, so it doesn’t get slowed down because it is only possible to run so much at a time. This can end up being more expensive, but it can end up benefiting you.
Caching
Data transferring is another thing that is good to have though off and how you want to do it. You can get away with having something simple or a little half-baked if you don’t have a huge amount of users, but it might not work as it grows. There are many ways to manage your data transference and it can be a good idea to split it up your data in your static and dynamic pages.
- Static pages are pages that doesn’t change, in terms of content, and will stay the same no matter who accesses it and uses it. This can be things like the home page or a landing page for your product or information.
- Dynamic pages are pages that do change depending who uses it. This can be things like a cart or a checkout page.
These two types of content will require different ways to transfer them and to have it be effective overall.
There are the overall caching, CDN, that can help you send similar content to multiple people. This is good for the static content, because it requires the same things over and over again. It is also good for high traffic pages. For the dynamic content it is better to use object caching as it stores the queries, that would be sent a lot, so it is a more automated process, therefore the server won’t get as many queries and won’t slow it down.
Microservice architecture
This is a specific way to structuring your site, so that only smaller parts get loaded at a time. This will make it easier for the site to load quickly, especially if it is a big site, if it comes in smaller chunks.
So, it might be a good thing to consider as your site reaches a certain size.
Load balancing
In a similar form as the previous method, load balancing is about spreading out the load of loading the site, so it doesn’t overwhelm the ability to load it. It involves spreading it out on cluster servers and evening out the burden.
Autoscaling
It is also a possibility that use autoscaling, especially if you have a lot of range in the amount of traffic on your site. Where load balancing gives you a permanent solution, to what to do if you have a lot of traffic, autoscaling will let you change the amount of bandwidth you use depending on how much you need at a specific time.
This is something that a lot of hosting providers will offer as a solution, so it is worth considering.
How to go about scaling
Knowing all of this how do you then go about scaling your website. There are two ways to scale – vertical and horizontal.
Vertical scaling means scaling up. The way this works is by increasing the capacity of one machine and making sure that this can run all that you want and need it to. This means that you use a single server to run everything.
The benefit of this approach:
- Straightforward deployment as you only have to manage one server. It is less technical which can help you set it up easier.
- Short-term it is cost effective as it is often cheaper and allows for more gradual growth.
- Unified processing as you only run one server there isn’t a lot of synchronization between multiple, which means that the process can run more smoothly.
- A reduced overhead as the one server is less monitoring and therefore less maintenance and work on both your part and your hosting provider.
- Rapid performance boost as it is an easy way increase your capacity in the moment without a lot of extra work.
Horizontal scaling means scaling out. This works by spreading out the scaling to multiple servers in a network to work together. This happens by creating a cluster of servers to run your site.
The benefits of this approach;
- Long-term it is cost effective as it gives you flexibility and incrementally adding more as time goes. It might have a bigger upfront cost as it requires a change from the beginner setup.
- Has resilience and redundancy as it is spread out over more servers, so if one fails the others can pick up the slack.
- It has simpler maintenance as it is basically just picking and choosing which servers to include when maintenance is done.
- Uses load balancing to spread out and avoid having bottlenecks that end up slowing your site down and creating problems.
It is also possible to mix and match to some extend and create a hybrid approach to find out what works best for you.
Conclusion
Thinking about scalability is an important part of running a site and can become necessary as your site grows. It can be a confusing process and might take a little time to figure out, but if you look what you might need now and in the future then you will be able to make a decision. Add that to what is available to you from your hosting provider and what budget you have and it might be a simpler choice than you had originally thought.