{"id":10370,"date":"2019-03-12T13:18:56","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T13:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/?post_type=blog&p=10370"},"modified":"2023-12-29T08:20:17","modified_gmt":"2023-12-29T13:20:17","slug":"online-merchants-guide-auto-scaling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/blog\/online-merchants-guide-auto-scaling\/","title":{"rendered":"The Online Merchant\u2019s Guide to Auto-Scaling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture this.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve spent weeks preparing for a massive online sale. Your products are priced right. Your social media influencers are primed and ready to help drive shoppers to your storefront.<\/p>\n

And they do their job! The sale begins and, within minutes, you\u2019re seeing a record amount of visitors on your site.<\/p>\n

And then one of the shoppers types in your storefront\u2019s web address, hits enter and sees this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And with that they are gone. If they are a pre-existing (loyal) customer, they may well return, but if your marketing programs were designed to reach new customers, there\u2019s an excellent chance they won\u2019t return, and could well be on a competitor\u2019s site.<\/p>\n

So how can you make sure this doesn\u2019t happen to your storefront?<\/em><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re stuck in a (legacy) dedicated hosting environment, your hands are somewhat tied. Dedicated hosting environments rely on physical data center based infrastructure. They are provisioned for a pre-defined maximum capacity, so as you approach peak capacity, your site will slow down, and if that capacity is exceeded, you\u2019re in the 503-zone! If you try and work around this by sizing your infrastructure over and above what you need, you\u2019ll be paying for capacity you will rarely use.<\/p>\n

E-commerce traffic is inherently dynamic and seldom predictable. No matter how great you are at demand forecasting, there is no way to predict your traffic during a sale, or in response to an aggressive marketing promotion, with 100% accuracy. Therefore, site crashes are an inevitable and frequent problem with dedicated hosting setups.<\/p>\n

There has to be a better (and more economical) way of dealing with this<\/em>. Well, there is, and it\u2019s called auto-scaling.<\/p>\n

What is Auto-Scaling?<\/h3>\n

Auto-scaling uses cloud-based compute resources (web servers) which are added to (known as a scale-out event) or removed from (known as a scale-in event) an online storefront\u2019s infrastructure, automatically, based on its needs at that point of time. In so doing, it automatically adjusts the capacity of your site to respond to changing demand (site traffic).<\/p>\n

Benefits:<\/strong><\/p>\n