PitchPersuasion

It’s very rare that I talk about my work on this blog and indeed I think it might be the first time ever. We are have launched a new on-demand managed hosting platform, so below is a quick pitch of what it is.

Why do I need scalable on-demand hosting?

If you are running a campaign/website/application that could get very busy then you face two challenges, unpredictability of visitors & cost.

Currently most agencies plan for busy sites by paying for lots of
servers to be set-up which costs lots of money.

The way to avoid this problem is to use a scalable on-demand platform.

What does this mean?

Simply said we are able to scale your websites & applications very easily and in a large number of cases, without you even having to change any code.  The most important part to you is that you don’t have to do anything as this is a fully managed service.

What we are offering

The solution to agencies, applications & businesses who want to harness on-demand computing and make use of flexible contracts to help their businesses save costs & improve service.

Classic vs On-Demand

Under a classic model if you had a 3-month campaign or busy period then you might have to buy a full load balanced infrastructure.

Cost Comparison

What it looks like - Classic vs. New

Our on-demand service works just the same as a normal dedicated server with additional benefits.
In the On-demand diagram the two extra servers are whited out as you can use them as needed.

Advantages

Flexibility

• If you need to upgrade you let us know and restart your server
• You can change your infrastructure on a month-by-month basis
• Add zones/instances to scale whenever you need

Cost & Time Reduction

• Pay for what you need when you need it rather than x-times more
• Rather than having to plan months in advance, decide on the day

Zero-Hassle

• We offer a fully managed service, set-up, monitoring backups..
• A team of experts are available to help you with your app/site

Disadvantages

• You won’t get to sign off those huge hosting budgets anymore

Last week we ran an interesting event called ScaleCampLondon at our offices in London Bridge.  The theme of the event was to address and educate people about how to build websites & applications which could potentially become very busy or grow quickly. 

There are a few key principles that account managers & project managers need to understand in order to ensure that their developers or agencies are doing what is needed.

Who needs to scale or plan to scale and why?

If you anticipate growing, plan the growth but don’t go overboard with infrastructure. Work out a rough number of visitors to your site and the period that they will visit in.

Do you need to think about scaling equation:
Number of visitors expected per day / number of hours you expect them to visit in
e.g. 100,000 visitors / 5 hours = 20,000 visitors per hour

Most typical servers can cope with around 20,000 ~ 50,000 visitors per hour depending on how efficient the website is. If you have over 20,000 visitors/h you may need multiple servers to cope with the load.

I’ve heard that load balancing is the solution, is it?

This depends entirely on what your goal is and what risk you want to mitigate.
I just want to protect against lots of visitors:
Usually 95% of sites can get away with simply splitting up what each server does. I.e. having a separate Database server and a Web server. Servers are extremely powerful these days and can cope with alot.
I just want to protect against lots of visitors & against server failure:
If you have invested lots into a campaign and want to hedge against servers failing then the only way forwards is to get a load-balanced solution. There are a number of ways this can be done, some are cheaper than others.

I want to have video & large images on my site

People believe that video and images is a challenge to have on a site and often envisage needing hundreds of servers and spending lots of money to do it. This is simply is not true.
There are currently two main ways of putting video on your site:

A - Use a service such as YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Flickr..
These are generally well known and I recomend Googling if you haven’t heard of them.
Advantages: Often free or near free
Disadvantages: Don’t load immediately & may lead your audience away from your site & isn’t very professional

B - Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with your host
A CDN (of which there are many) is the Rolls Royce of delivering content very quickly to your audience irrespective of where they are. I.e. A network of global servers it loads from the closest server to them rather than potentially across the world.
Advantages: Allows you to deliver any video/image content including HD
Disadvantages: Costs slightly more usually £0.25 ~ £0.35/GB

Is there any way that I can test the capacity of our site?

Yes there is, you can either ask your host or developer to do Load Testing. The idea is to mimic lots of users using the site at the same time to ensure that everything is sufficiently optimised for your needs. This usually incurs a fee which can vary from £250-£1000+ depending on how comprehensive the testing is.

Some of our sites load slowly what can we do

There are a number of ways that you can improve this and it could be for a number of reasons. A few quick easy fixes are below:

• Get your developer to add caching to your site (watch video below for more info)
• Use a CDN
• Get a more powerful server

Videos from ScaleCampLondon

Below are some of the videos from the event, some are a little technical but they should give you a good overview of the technologies you need to know about if you’re building big websites.

Caching & Content Distribution Networks (CDNs)


Load testing
A:Is good to do but not always straight forwards