Could you actually cope if your online business really took off?
It’s probably something that many online businesses dream of but are you actually geared up to cope with the knock-on consequences if your business really took off by growing, say 10 fold, 100 fold, perhaps 1000 fold?
Realistically I suspect that most places aren’t expecting to grow quite that much and therefore never consider the consequences if somehow they did.
The first problems are likely to come when you grow around 10 to 100 fold in that you’ll find that you can’t simply keep upgrading the bandwidth of your hosting service anymore and hit the limit of the shared hosting services that most people use. Beyond that, the price jumps somewhat but the service levels available jump even more once you move into VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and find that instead of sharing the server with several hundred other users that there’s only a handful of others thus the speed of response of your website jumps quite dramatically. The jump upwards to dedicated hosting need not be any more difficult but it does open the door to running the server as though it were just sitting on your desk.
However, that does assume that your software can actually cope with that level of growth. For example, have you allowed for tens of thousands of customers instead of merely hundreds in your customer reference number? Many places find that such problems kick in suddenly and dramatically. If, say, your products are initially targetted at country areas you could find that you’ve a builtin assumption that there would never be more than 1000 customers in a given area. Fine for the country, but what if you start moving into metropolitan areas and find that you have more than 1000 customers in a single area but only three digits to refer to them?
Finally, don’t forget that as your customer base grows, so too do the number of “awkward” customers who’d like you to change things to suit them. Without a flexible system, you could find that you can’t deal with them at all.
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