Growth is the reason parents are buying their kids new shoes so often, and why their grocery bill is so high once those kids become teenagers. Websites are never going to have a voracious appetite in the same sense, but there are going to be instances where they do need to grow and have more resources made available to them. For business websites that type of growth is a good thing, as it means ever-greater numbers of people are finding the website. When a website needs to be ‘scaled’ that means it needs to be reformatted, and usually within the context of being bigger and more functional. It’s here that managed hosting with load balancing may be something that you want to consider.
The benefits of WordPress managed hosting are quite extensive, and one thing that’s for sure is you will get real value out of your higher yearly term for this type of web hosting. Plenty of small businesses go the affordable route and choose to have a WordPress business website, and if yours is at the point where it needs to be scaled then it may also be the same point where it might make sense to switch over to managed hosting. You will always want to be assured of secure managed WordPress hosting, and we always have that assurance for everyone here at 4GoodHosting.
If scaling your website is something you can do yourself then that’s great, and you’re probably a person who’s learned al lot about being a webmaster after first starting out building a Wordpress website. Either that or you were pretty darn good with this stuff to begin with, and you still chose the WordPress platform because of the simplicity it offers and the fact you simply don’t need a website with all the bells and whistles. If neither scenario applies to you and you also know nothing about PIPEDA-compliant hosting then you can opt to have your scaling taken care of for you via managed web hosting.
Load balancing is an integral part of this process, and in a lot of ways it’s like your website is a small sea craft and you’re making sure that you don’t have too much in the stern or aft before you head out from port. That’s one analogy of many you can make, but what we’ll do with this week’s blog entry here is look at the role of load balancers in scaling WordPress sites. We’re sure there’s some value in it for anyone who’s becoming more in-the-know about webmaster tasks, and ideally that applies to some of you.
Better Distribution
Any overview of managed hosting with load balancing should start with defining exactly what it means to balance a website’s load. Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming Internet traffic across multiple servers and then dividing user requests like viewing pages, submitting forms, and other interactions between several hosting servers. While doing so with identical copies of your WordPress website. This ensures that it’s not just one server that has to handle all incoming traffic by itself.
In this way the load balancer servers as a traffic cop of sorts, parked in front of the server and waving requests in the most appropriate direction given the heaviness of traffic. Some servers are going to be better destinations than others, and the factors that determine this will be the current load, response time, or specific distribution settings. Load balancing for sites is an important matter in the same way that secure managed WordPress hosting is for anyone who has an online business where customers make purchases with credit cards online. When those customers arrive at the site in greater numbers at nearly all times then a single server may struggle to handle increased traffic.
It’s at this point that you need to start scaling the site. And likely starting with load balancing too if you need to add more servers to your infrastructure, effectively scaling your site’s capacity to handle more concurrent users. Site availability may be an issue too, especially if one server is repeatedly failing or needs maintenance. With proper load balancing the traffic can be redirected to other healthy servers, ensuring your site remains accessible. Website performance is primarily gauged by page load speeds, and this can be improved with load balancing via scaling too.
Requests are distributed across multiple servers, and this significantly reduces response times when traffic spikes occur. Content delivery can be upped too, and for sites with a global audience load balancing can route users to servers physically closer to them. This makes for way less latency and an overall better user experience. Load balancing is also big for security, and the better load balancers can provide an additional layer of security by filtering out malicious traffic before it gets anywhere near the WordPress servers.
Load Balancing Gains
Load balancers do really help with performance, but what is likely even more important if you have a small business website is they ensure the site stays up and running during unexpected traffic spikes. This is big for having consistently good SEO for your site rankings and user experience. Implementing load balancing for a WordPress site requires planning and configuration to ensure it goes smoothly and operates correctly. Traffic rerouting is also a big part of what you gain when sites are scaled for better load balancing, and what happens is the load balancer periodically sends requests to each server in the pool to assess its health.
If one of them fails then the load balancer automatically removes it from the pool and redirects incoming traffic to servers that are better fit for accommodating the request(s). This ensures that traffic stays distributed and prevents overloading any server that’s not handling them well.
How often health checks are performed can vary depending on your website, server, and the level of traffic and responsiveness needed. Similarly, the types of checks can also be customized to match your site requirements and infrastructure. Go with managed hosting with load balancing and you’ll have all of this seen to at all times via your Canada web hosting provider.
As we touched on earlier the greatest gain is going to be with reliably faster server responses at all times. This is achieved by distributing user requests across multiple servers, and so when a server has to handle fewer simultaneous connections it needs much less time to processing any of them. Similarly, because multiple servers are available, requests spend less time waiting in the queue, leading to faster initial response times. This is especially beneficial when scaling WordPress hosting for sites that are used for eCommerce stores.
Enhanced uptime and reliability is also part of why webmasters will be scaling sites that are seeing significant growths in incoming traffic. The possibility of any real downtime becomes next to zero because multiple servers being available means that if one fails the others can continue to handle traffic. It also becomes possible to detect server issues and reroute traffic, ensuring continuous service availability. In the event a server fails it can be taken offline for maintenance or updates without affecting site availability, and any traffic incoming during this time will be redirected to alternate servers in the pool.
The next mention in our discussion of how load balancers improve website performance will be for vertical resource scaling. Site resources can be increased as needed based on traffic patterns, along with enabling auto-scaling features that automatically adjust resources according to current demand. As your WordPress site grows, load balancing allows for gradual, manageable expansion of your infrastructure.
Load Balancing + Site Caching
This can be a powerful combination when reconfiguring a website for better accommodation of traffic spikes and other needs related to growth. Caching in WordPress hosting is a method used to store frequently accessed files and data on a server or user’s browser, reducing the need to fetch it from the database or disk storage every time a user requests your site’s content. Website performance becomes much better because of reducing loading times and server load.
Caching also lowers the strain on your server and speeds up response times. There are different types of caching, and is object caching and page caching that are most directly beneficial when implemented along load balancers. Object caching is used to store database query results, API responses, and other data in memory for quick retrieval. It reduces database load across all servers while ensuring data consistency across multiple servers and improves performance when generating dynamic content.
The standard approach and the one most hosting providers will use when providing managed hosting with load balancing is to update the “wp-config.php” file to enable object caching. This approach is nearly failsafe with it comes to ensuring all servers use the same caching configuration, monitor cache hit rates, and adjust accordingly.
Page caching is when entire pages are stored to serve content to returning visitors without using PHP or needing to query the database. Entire web pages are stored as static HTML files so that WordPress doesn’t need to process the page on every request. This is the most effective method for delivering static content. Page caching also reduces server load and speeds up response times for cached pages while allowing the servers to handle more users at the same time. And the good news for any DIY webmaster is that often it is possible to cache pages with the use of a WordPress plugin.
Superior CDN Function
Site caching also improves content delivery network (CDN) integration and especially well when the site is serving static content like HTML, CSS, and images from servers in different locations around the globe. CDNs for SEO and WordPress hosting offload static content delivery from your servers which improves load times for users across different locations and reduces bandwidth usage on your primary (origin) servers. Definitely something to consider if your site is heaving with content and if you are using it to promote sales then you will also want to familiarize yourself with PIPEDA-compliant hosting in Canada.
The last thing we’ll mention here related to site scaling and the use of load balancers is to suggest that you will want to keep an eye on the request distribution across the different servers, their response times, error rates, and server health. Also make regular check-ins on your uptime percentages and most webmasters will also be setting up alerts for downtime or slow responses.
Be aware as well that a hosting provider will have failover mechanisms in place for managed hosting clients. These are beneficial to have too as they allow for automatic switching to a backup server or data center in case of a failure. All standard fare with a good Canadian web hosting provider like 4GoodHosting.
