PitchPersuasion

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