Website Scalability

As an E-commerce business grows, the traffic grows, however if you are not ready for it, it may limit many things. Wikipedia defines scalability as, “the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.” In simple words, scalability means being able to handle the increasing number to visitors, customers or users when the website and business grow.

A scalable website has the following principles-

• Availability-

  Availability is very important. Unavailability can cost you a lot of customers and visitors. And it can only be taken care of when there’s quick recovery for failures of systems.

• Performance-

  performance being not up to the mark will lead to improper user interaction and users will leave dissatisfied which will also affect SEO ranking.

• Manageability-

  It should be user friendly, easy to access and maintain, and problems should be manageable.

• Maintenance-

  As software needs to be maintained, servers needs to be maintained too. It is done by using tools and techniques to monitor applications and update them when needed.

Tips for creating scalable websites:

Site hosting-

Launching is not a big task but selecting a host planning for scalability is very important as the demand may increase. Many developers will provide you package for hosting or you will need to buy it but what must be kept in mind is scalability. A virtual private server is more powerful and scalable than a shared server.

Laying-off-

In layman terms, it is not optional in development architecture, it is like a backup option. You do not want to lose important data stored on server if anything goes wrong. You should keep another copy of it and run it, so in case anything goes wrong, there will be no problem.

Services-

Websites deals with two things- reading and writing. When a user is looking for anything, google looks up the most relevant keywords and give results. This is the process of writing and reading. As a business grows, the needs will increase like storage needs and the need of information or data will too. For this SOA (service-oriented Architecture) is required. It will enable sharing of writing and reading functions.

Speed-

As your business scale, it uses more amount of data and your users may loose the speed. So, you will need much more faster memory access.

Partitions-

Horizontal and vertical scaling will help you plan for added capacity. If you want to add more resources to your existing single server, you can use vertical scaling. However, if you want to add more nodes or another server you can consider horizontal scaling.

So, when it comes to building scalable websites, a lot of time, realization of the mistakes that can be committed and lots of planning is required. Every company dreams of business growth in terms of increased traffic, customers, ROI and much more. And by being able to adapt to it will ensure more growth.