I read a presentation today that covered the challenges businesses face when scaling their web properties as they become more successful. It was originally written and presented by John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace IT Hosting. It’s a good explanation of the various stages of growth that online businesses go through and the associated issues that come along the way. There are some mentions of best practices and good recommendations included as well. These are tried and true methods that Rackspace and John have gleaned from their extensive experience with high traffic customers.
You can download the entire presentation in PDF format by clicking here.
The problems outlined in the presentation are well documented and prevalent across the web hosting industry….TODAY. However, with the emergence of on-demand hosting by leveraging cloud computing, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Simple DB, are many of these challenges still relevant? At the very least on their way to becoming irrelevant in the near future.
As a site owner, if you decide to host with Amazon, you don’t face the horizontal scaling issues that come with traditional web hosting. Those problems are taken out of the equation for you by Amazon. Need more hosting horsepower? Add another server in minutes. That type of horizontal hardware scaling can, and often does, take many days in the traditional web hosting model. Cloud computing is not currently without flaws, but these will be worked out over time. For now, the benefits far outweigh the risks when compared to the traditional web hosting model when looking at it from a scalability perspective.
