The importance of scalbility.
All websites have a limit to how much traffic and processing they can handle, with a small, low traffic website this may be an afterthought, but as your business grows and you start to receive more traffic, you will almost certainly encounter teething issues with scaling your website.
Signs that your website isn't robust enough to handle the increase in traffic are:
- Slow and sluggish loading times
- Lagging or crashing functionality
- An increase in errors and page crashes
- Heavy load or an increase in costs on your hosting servers
What can be done.
There are many ways to increase the capacity of your website without the need to throw extra money at expensive hosting packages.
Before you do this you should consider whether your website can be optimised to make the most of the space you have, a website which is optimised to expect and easily handle a heavy load is considered scalable.
Common ways to improve the scalability of a website include:
- Optimising the code base to remove any bottlenecks or slow running code
- Optimising the hosting server to handle requests efficiently
- Refactoring code to place labour intensive functions into background or delayed processes
- Optimising databases and queries
- Implementing and optimising caching strategies
- Refactoring the application into a more distributed, service oriented architecture
- Using load balancing strategies to handle more simulations requests more easily
Each website will be analysed and tested, and a implementation strategy will be formed specific to the needs and problems in each case. Ensuring the changes made have the optimal effect for minimal cost, and avoiding expensive 'overkill' development work.