How to avoid downtime with increasing workload: strategies and solutions
The growth of online business is always a positive sign, but along with the increase in traffic, a new problem arises: will your infrastructure withstand the increased load? Crashes, slow page loading, and even complete downtime can lead to loss of customers, loss of trust, and lower profits.
How can we ensure the smooth operation of the service when the load increases dramatically? In this article, we will analyze the key strategies that will help you minimize the risks of downtime and maintain system stability even during peak activity periods.
Why does downtime occur when the load increases?
Downtime is the time during which the server or web service is unavailable to users. This is a big problem for both small businesses and large enterprises. The lack of access to the site causes real harm to your business. The reasons may be different:
Insufficient resources – the server is overloaded and cannot handle incoming requests, which may cause your site to be partially unavailable or completely inoperable.
- Incorrect architecture – the system is not optimized for scaling.
- DDoS attacks – attackers load the server with a huge number of requests. We talked about this earlier in our blog, you can find it here - DDOS ATTACKS
- Inefficient database management – slow SQL queries slow down the system.
- Network failures – problems with Internet connection or overload of data transmission channels.
How to avoid downtime?
In order for the system to remain stable even during periods of a sharp increase in load, it is important to think over a scaling and optimization strategy in advance.
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Vertical scaling is an improvement in the hardware characteristics of the server (more CPU, RAM, SSD).
Horizontal scaling is the addition of additional servers and load balancing between them.
The best solution is to use a hybrid approach. For example, first increase the capacity of the main server, and then, with a further increase in load, switch to a distributed system. You can learn more about these types of scaling HERE
Load balancing
Load balancers (for example, Nginx, HAProxy, or AWS ELB cloud solutions) allow you to evenly distribute traffic between multiple servers. This reduces the load on each individual server and prevents overloads.
Advantages:
- Automatic distribution of requests.
- High fault tolerance.
- Flexibility in scaling.
Database optimization
Databases are one of the most vulnerable points when the load increases.
Use caching (Redis, Memcached) to reduce the load on the database.
Divide the database into several servers (sharding) this method is used by many online stores with heavy loads, so it is proven that it helps.
Set up replication to improve fault tolerance.
Using CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN (for example, Cloudflare, Akamai) helps reduce server load by distributing content across multiple nodes worldwide. This speeds up website loading and reduces the risk of overloading.
Advantages of CDN:
- Faster page loading.
- Protection against DDoS attacks.
- Traffic optimization.
Cloud servers and automatic scaling
Cloud solutions such as MivoCloud allow you to quickly increase server capacity depending on the load. This is a good enough approach for businesses of various levels from small to the largest enterprises.
Advantages of cloud servers:
- Flexibility – resources can be increased and decreased in real time.
- High availability – the system will continue to work even in case of failures.
- Cost optimization – you pay only for the resources you use.
Load monitoring and forecasting
Using monitoring tools (Prometheus, Zabbix, Grafana) helps to monitor the status of servers and prevent possible failures.
Set up automatic notifications about increased workload.
Analyze peak activity hours and plan resources in advance.
Use AI algorithms to predict possible overloads.
How can MivoCloud help you avoid downtime?
MivoCloud offers powerful server solutions that will help you cope with increased workload without downtime:
- Cloud servers (Hourly Cloud, NVMe VPS, SSD KVM VPS) – instant scaling without the need for physical server upgrades.
- Dedicated Servers (Dedicated Servers, Ryzen VDS, Storage VPS) are powerful machines for heavy loads.
- Load balancers – automatically distribute traffic between servers.
- DDoS protection – prevents attacks that can lead to downtime.
- Locations in the USA, Romania, Moldova and Russia – low latency and high performance.
- 24/7 technical support – prompt assistance in case of any problems.
Do you want your project to work stably even under high load? Choose server solutions from MivoCloud and forget about downtime!
Go to MivoCloud.com and find out which solution is right for you!