It’s the biggest day of the year for your website. 

Your content has undergone countless revisions and you’ve fine-tuned the look of your site to deliver the best possible visitor experience. 

Your intended audience is pouring in from all corners of the internet as your website traffic numbers swell to exciting new heights.

Then your website crashes—it wasn’t properly provisioned to scale with the surge of traffic.

Don’t let your biggest day be your worst day

It’s a scenario all too easy to imagine, and one that could be avoided with WordPress VIP’s auto scaling. Our auto scaling rapidly adds capacity to avoid performance degradation, allowing our high-performing infrastructure to maintain load times automatically during website traffic surges. 

It’s the best scaling solution for enterprise sites running WordPress, maximizing stability for customers through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling.

We provision these resources strategically to deliver the best results possible when auto scaling for high traffic on the largest sites.

Vertical scaling: building a bigger house

WordPress VIP’s vertical scaling involves dynamically adjusting the resources of a server to match your site’s demands. This approach ensures optimum performance by making the most of available resources.

Picture it like this: You have a four bedroom house and four people living in it. For simplicity’s sake, their names are Application, Cache, Database, and Cron. The four of them get along great partly because they communicate really well together.

If Application needs something from Cache, it just yells out from its bedroom, “Hey, what’s for dinner?” 

And Cache yells back, “Spaghetti and meatballs!”

It’s fast, efficient, and there’s little chance of missing the message.

Turns out Cache has an identical twin who wants to move in. They decide to share a room and split the rent. 

Application doesn’t care because when it asks, “What’s for dinner?” it only cares about the answer. As long as one of the twins yells back, it doesn’t mind who pays the rent. 

But there’s a limit. Eventually the house runs out of space. They can’t invite anymore inhabitants unless they extend the house and add more rooms. Even then, they’re limited by the land they own and how many levels they can build. 

Eventually there’s the possibility that the house gets too full and they have to start turning visitors away.

This is analogous to hitting the limits of vertical scaling.

But WordPress VIP doesn’t rely entirely on vertical scaling. Instead we deploy both horizontal and vertical scaling to ensure our resources can grow up and out with the demands of your site. 

Let’s next explore how WordPress VIP makes use of horizontal scaling to ensure additional visitors don’t get turned away.

Horizontal scaling: expanding out

WordPress VIP’s horizontal auto scaling focuses on adding containers as your WordPress site’s load escalates. This approach ensures high availability and reliability even during traffic spikes.

Thinking back to our house example: instead of everyone living in one house, now we have an Application house, Cache house, Database house, and Cron house. 

By pooling their resources they can buy as much land as they like and never have to worry about running out of houses for everyone. They add more houses whenever more room is needed.

Now that they have multiple houses to contain everyone, they can expand their community as much as they’d like. 

In this case, communication between containers needs to be organized more efficiently, but the upside is a tremendous potential for scale.   

Scalable solutions for large enterprise sites

Maximizing the potential of major sites is why WordPress VIP relies on both vertical and horizontal scaling to support auto scaling for enterprise customers. By deploying both when relevant, WordPress VIP expertly integrates the strengths of each, offering unmatched control over resource allocation and unrivaled stability. 

Scale for your biggest day and every day

WordPress VIP’s comprehensive auto scaling services are the key to addressing the challenges posed by both expected and unexpected traffic spikes, meeting the resource allocation needs for the largest sites on the web. 

Ready to unlock the full potential of auto scaling for your enterprise site? Schedule a demo with our WordPress experts to start exploring our scalable cloud architecture.