Best Practices For Web Hosting at Scale 

Whether it’s Black Friday or a marketing campaign gone viral – there are countless times that you need your website to cope with a surge in traffic, without sacrificing loading times or compromising security. Scalability, speed, and security aren’t luxuries. If you’re running a high-traffic website, especially for e-commerce, content delivery, or SaaS applications, you should leverage agile hosting solutions to keep up with user demand and ensure performance and availability.

What is Scalabale Web Hosting?

Scalable web hosting allows your website to dynamically scale to match the influx of traffic, allocating additional resources including memory, bandwidth, and processing power. Infrastructure can be scaled vertically (adding more capacity to the existing resources) or horizontally (adding more servers or instances.) This ensures that the hosting environment is optimised in several ways, from server performance and data storage to load balancing and security measures. 

Best Practices For Scalable Web Hosting

Using scalable web hosting, you can set up an environment to support the current needs of your business without compromising performance, reliability, or cost-effectiveness. Here’s what you should consider as part of your strategy:

Cloud Infrastructure

Traditional hosting relies on a single physical server, while cloud hosting uses a network of virtual servers to distribute resources. This offers a number of benefits, including:

• Scalability: Cloud hosting enables resource scaling on-demand, to easily handle sudden traffic spikes or growth over time.
• Reliability: As data is stored in different servers, cloud hosting delivers higher redundancy with less downtime.
• Flexibility: Cloud infrastructure is highly customizable and can be easily adapted to changing business needs.
• Cost Efficiency: Cloud hosting is mostly based on a pay-as-you-go model, so you pay for what you use and not a fixed amount like traditional hosting.

High Availability and Load Balancing

High-availability hosting ensures your web applications are continuously available, even in the event of server failures or maintenance – ideal for e-commerce sites, SaaS, and other high-traffic platforms where a minute of unavailability could lead to massive revenue loss and reputational damage. High-availability hosting rests on effective load balancing, where incoming traffic is distributed across multiple servers to avoid overloading any single server. 

Security and Compliance

The more scalable your web hosting environments become, so does the increased risk of cyber threats. However, this is easily managed through well-structured security and compliance policies. 

You should take care to regularly update all the software used on your system to protect against known vulnerabilities, and deploy security measures like Firewalls and DDoS protection at the network level to block malicious traffic. Alongside, data should be encrypted at rest and in transit. 

There is also always room for human error, so access controls should be implemented through strong authentication and limiting access to critical systems.

Performance Optimization

As you scale your web hosting, the performance of the website becomes increasingly important. If you don’t want loading times to increase, there are some simple performance optimization techniques you can test: 

• CDNs: Make use of Content Delivery Networks to load your content closer to the users’ geographical regions to reduce latency and improve load times.
• Caching: Minimize the load of queries on your database by implementing server-side caching.
• Optimize your database: Routinely run housekeeping to optimize your database through indexing, query optimization, and archiving old data.

Cost Management

Scaling costs don’t have to spiral out of control. Make sure you optimize resource usage by monitoring your resource utilization and deprecate unused resources. Leverage auto-scaling to dynamically scale resources according to the demand, while reducing costs during low traffic.

Choose a hosting provider with fast storage 

Managed cloud hosting provider Hosted Power built their innovative platform TurboStack on UpCloud’s Private Cloud for fine-grain control over CPUs and data centers, as well as robust infrastructure operations, uptime guarantees, and security.

For one major cosmetics retailer, Hosted Power was able to increase loading speed 34% by running their site on TurboStack, atop UpCloud. Guidelines recommend websites should aim for a Largest Contentful Paint – the render time of the largest image, text block, or video visible when the user first navigated to the page – of 2.5 second or less. Hosted Power decreased LCP from 2.011 seconds down to just 1.334 seconds. 

Meanwhile Finland’s leading e-commerce supplier Vilkas migrated to UpCloud for scalability, flexibility, and responsiveness, to enable their merchants to easily scale as-needed.

“When you’re competing against Amazon and other significant players, you need to offer compelling reasons for merchants to choose your services. We differentiate ourselves on speed, so the fact that we have been able to provide our merchants better results on Lighthouse tests is very important.” – Noora Kahra, CEO, Vilkas 

Conclusion

Scalable web hosting is a must-have for business today – there’s no need to compromise with slow loading times or lax security. Scalability, speed, and security are not luxuries, they are imminently achievable.

Choosing the appropriate web hosting for your business is crucial. UpCloud provides scalable, high-performance cloud hosting designed to help hosting providers grow and optimize their services. If you’d like to test it out for yourself, chat to our team about a free demo, or give it a spin yourself with a free trial.