Scalability Within The Cloud – Is Your Site Prepared?

Is your site ready to meet future demands?

When it comes to business or computing, growth is rarely a bad thing. Most people running a business are always looking for ways to expand their clientele and make more money. Similarly in computing, it is generally a good thing when there is more and more demand for your website. However, if you’re not prepared, this growth can crash your system.
Scalability is the ability to function properly when an increase of work and demand occurs. As demand goes up, scalability provides you with the resources to meet this demand. Without the option of scalability, a system will fail when it becomes overloaded.
An example of a poor use of scalability is a small hotel. Let’s say a hotel can accommodate 300 people. This may initially seem like plenty of space to the owner considering his hotel is located in a rural area away from many tourist attractions. Business is going considerably well, until a brand new state-of-the-art amusement park is built only 2 miles from his hotel. Now, the hotel is filling up every single night. The owner is pleased at first with the increase in business, but he quickly realizes that there are too many people wanting to stay in his hotel, and his staff can’t handle the ongoing traffic. He may allow more people to stay in each room, but this will only lead to more problems such as uncleanliness and insufficient resources to keep each room stocked. Without expanding the size of his hotel, there is no room for growth. He can’t extend the hotel without shutting down for a time and carrying out extensive construction work. He will eventually become overwhelmed with demand, and the hotel will crash.
This same kind of thing can happen to a website. As it receives more and more traffic, it will require more resources. Traffic may seem like a good thing for your site and business, but without the proper resources, this increase can crash your site. Scalability is your solution as it allows you to add resources at the click of a mouse.
Once again, the cloud is our lifesaver. Cloud computing allows your website to upscale or downscale your IT requirements depending on your demand. The cloud provides you with the easiest option to be able to scale up or down.
The great thing about this is that you are only charged for what you are using. As you scale up, you can choose exactly how many more resources you need. You can typically choose an increase in RAM, storage, etc, but it isn’t necessary to pay for a plan that is going to give you too much storage. If you need to take a step back, it’s easy to scale down which will cost you even less money.
Scalability is generally broken up into two categories: scale horizontally (scale out), and scale vertically (scale up).
Scale horizontally:
Scaling horizontally refers to adding physical hardware to a system. This is usually done when an additional server is implemented. Scaling out will generally require a change in the infrastructure.
Scale vertically:
Scaling vertically is adding more resources, such as memory or an additional CPU. This will basically resize your server without affecting your website. Your site is provided with more RAM, more bandwidth and more storage to be able to handle the growth. This is generally a faster and easier option.
Cloud scalability can sometimes be confused with cloud elasticity. Although they are similar, there is a small difference in that elasticity is aimed at being able to adapt to workload changes in an autonomic manner. This means that resources adapt to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users.
ECommerce is an example of when you may need elasticity. If you instantaneously receive a dramatic increase in users, cloud elasticity counters this by automatically adapting. The downside to this? It is generally expensive and does not allow you to manage it with the click of a button.
An alternative to elasticity is VPS.net’s Power Pack option. This option does essentially the same thing, but allows you to double your cloud servers’ power in periods of peak demand. The best part about it? Power Pack is much cheaper than cloud elasticity options, and offers even more power.
At VPS.net, our cloud management system will autoscale to add the resources to your cloud server when you need to scale up. This is done instantly, and doesn’t even require a reboot. Our experts handle all of the scaling for you, allowing you to focus on how you’re going to expand the rest of your business.
Be prepared for your business’s growth with VPS.net’s Cloud Hosting services!