What do you do if your Internet business really takes off?
One of the great things about the Internet is that the software is usually scaleable ie you can run with 1000 visitors per day on your website just as easily as you can with 10.
Well, most of the time that’s true. What you’ll find though is that you start needing to upgrade your hosting package as the business grows. That’s not a problem though for reasonable growth and, for example, we expect to have to upgrade our own hosting package once a year usually. What we’d not allowed for was the effect of a few seemingly minor changes in our promotion efforts over the past year kicking in with a vengeance and lifting our site traffic around 20 fold within a few weeks.
Even that growth rate wasn’t a problem but it required us to upgrade our hosting package three times in three successive weeks to catch up with the growth in traffic on the sites. Now, that’s not a problem in that the software is scaleable but what it has done is to move us to the top option on shared hosting which means that after the next upgrade we’ll have to start looking at VPS hosting which is much more expensive. That extra expense is down to the much lower number of other users on the server: instead of hundreds, it’ll be about 4 or 5. Obviously, that’ll improve the speed of our sites somewhat and I suspect that may well mean that I’ll need to upgrade almost immediately afterwards.
So although you can usually cope with quite substantial growth in the traffic on your sites with no problem other than needing to upgrade the hosting now and again, it’s as well to look a few upgrades ahead in case you run off the end of potential upgrades on your existing path. Ultimately of course you can go to a dedicated server but you might want to consider hiring a professional to look after your sites by the time you get to that point.
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