The Importance of Scaling Websites for Traffic Spikes

Most business websites start with minimum visitors at the beginning but as they grow the site faces issues to support the influx of traffic. Online businesses have to overcome many challenges to keep their websites running smoothly for customers or users.  Unfortunately many business owners do not realize the importance of scaling their websites until they face the repercussions due to heavy traffic. With users now demanding higher speeds and uninterrupted service, even a small performance issue or an outage of few seconds can frustrate customers. They get irritated and move on to competitors sites. That's why websites need to take measures to improve their abilities and scale up resources to support traffic loads. 

Issues With Traffic Spikes

The primary symptom with excess web traffic is, the site often experiences performance or accessibility problems. When the site reaches its maximum capability of handling the traffic, it starts encountering issues. With traffic increase, the load on web server increases and the current bandwidth may no longer support the surge. The traffic spike may also affect the functionality of other things like database, network, third party web services or APIs. The problem is just by looking at the site you cannot pinpoint the root cause or determine how much traffic the site can handle.

How to Identify the Need for Scalability?

Before you consider scaling up your website, you need to understand the site traffic capability. This can be done by monitoring the traffic and analyzing how the site is working against user demands. A service like web site monitoring will help identifying the issues with website performance.If you notice a degrade in functionality of any site component due to traffic spike then it is time to look into the issue and consider scaling or optimizing the resource. For instance, if you realize that the existing hosting service is not enough to cope with the situations of website traffic spikes, then you may need to consider upgrading your hosting resources or move to a better service. Thus by knowing how your website is performing against traffic, you can pinpoint the root cause and plan for ways to scale your website.

Which Aspects of Website May Need Scalability?

Many think that having unlimited bandwidth will take care of issues caused by heavy web traffic. But what about hardware or database bottlenecks? For instance if the site is using user login which crosschecks the database for signing in the users, with increase in traffic the number of requests to the database also increases. To handle this surge, the database has to scale up to accommodate more user data and process more workload. That means in addition to scaling the physical resources of database such as CPU, memory and storage of an existing server, the performance also has to be optimized for handling higher loads. Hence, it is not just the hosting that may need scaling up, but sometimes the other aspects of design or functionality may also need to change to accommodate the scalability. So, once you know where the problem is, you can use measures to avoid the issues of downtime and performance.