Cloud Scaling Magento – From Basic to Complex

Magento works best with a strong hosting infrastructure that can deliver a delightful user experience with powerful features and functionalities: 100% availability, unparalleled scalability, 360° security, and lightning-fast performance.

Used by the biggest businesses across the world, cloud hosting is both popular and well-tailored for the unpredictability of the eCommerce environment. The best aspect of using Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) cloud services is that it enables nearly infinite scaling of your server. Since cloud hosting spans across several servers, it is easy to manage unexpected peaks in traffic without leading to costly downtime or performance slowdowns, particularly when your customers are browsing through your products or, worse, trying to checkout.

Another advantage of switching to the cloud is the pay-as-you-go model. Cloud hosting is significantly more cost-effective when efficiently managed since you only use the capacity you need when you need it. However, poorly managed cloud hosting implementation can be quite the opposite.

Managed Hosting

A professionally managed Magento hosting provider is a Magento specialist that provides a complete range of services from site migration and deployment to ongoing site protection, scalability, and performance optimization, to day-to-day management. Managed hosting requires no work from the side of the business owner and entails a monthly retainer fee.

A suite of technologies that are tailored for the Magento platform, such as elastic scaling (in and out) to accommodate the rapid shifts in traffic is supported by reliable managed hosting service providers. Managed hosting ensures that servers and all essential applications are continuously monitored, maintained, and secured. This makes managed hosting an incredibly valuable solution as systems are never left unpatched or open to vulnerabilities.

Scalability

When you experience a 10X or 100X spike in your normal traffic, your capacity can be surpassed quickly, causing your online store to crash or slow down enough to hinder your ability to complete successful checkouts.

Once you analyze your store size, determine the amount of traffic that your hosting infrastructure will be able to process during normal as well as peak traffic cycles. This will give you a clear understanding of the hosting architecture’s size and complexity necessary to accommodate your traffic.
The best approach is to opt for a setup that scales out and in, automatically and predictively depending on the traffic level. If you can predictively scale your infrastructure, you will stay ‘right-sized’ at all times and will never fall behind the demand. By avoiding being over-provisioned and costly downtime by being under-provisioned, you can save significant costs.

When choosing an eCommerce hosting platform for your Magento storefront, scalability is a critical factor. Mentioned below are the different types of scaling:

• Vertical Scaling( Scale Up)

Vertical scaling is when you want to increase the capacity or bandwidth of an existing single server that hosts your Magento site. This is accomplished by adding more hardware, such as computing power, RAM, storage, or any other resources, to your server.
In general, vertical scaling is costly and requires some downtime to upgrade and restart your resources. Besides, it does not make your computer fault-tolerant. So, if you are running a Magento site on a single server and it needs maintenance, your site will go down too. Also, vertical scaling is constrained in the sense that you can only scale within the limits of your server capacity.

• Horizontal Scaling ( Scale Out)

To cope with volatile, dynamic peaks in site traffic, horizontal scaling is the method of adding more servers. Usually, this is followed by adding a load balancer (reverse proxy) to spread user requests (load) between the different servers in your new cluster.

The load balancer automatically distributes loads by monitoring each server’s status (how many requests are handled by each server, which servers are idle, and which servers are overloaded with queued requests) and rerouting new requests to the next available server. Before selecting a server, it often factors in the network overhead.

Horizontal Scaling is much better than vertical scaling since it doesn’t entail a restart of the system. With no downtime whatsoever, and without compromising the high availability of your Magento site, horizontal scaling can be accomplished.

• Manual Scaling

As the term implies, manual scaling requires someone to handle scaling up and out (or down and in) as required. This is both time-consuming and reactive since it usually takes place in response to one or more demand spikes. Manual scaling is also vulnerable to human error. It can result in additional costs if someone forgets to scale back down in time.

• Auto Scaling

Auto-scaling is the mechanism by which the number of servers assigned to your Magento site automatically scales up or down depending on its needs at any point in time. Cloud auto-scaling enables you to configure trigger points (named alarms and warning escalations) that automatically respond in pre-defined ways when limits are exceeded. For example, your setup automatically scales up, down, in, or out when memory, network usage, or request processing rates go above or below a predetermined threshold.

• Predictive Auto Scaling

Predictive Auto Scaling is when your hosting infrastructure scales not just automatically, but also predictively in expectation of potential traffic based on current trends and machine learning. Predictive auto-scaling ensures that your Magento site is always up and available and has just the right resource provisioning without overpaying for resources to avoid site slowdowns or outages.

At Envision eCommerce, we provide optimized eCommerce web hosting services for your business growth. Check out our list of eCommerce Hosting Packages to get your business off the ground.