Autoscaling For WordPress Hosting. You still don’t use it?

Autoscaling for WordPress. Rings any bell? No? Keep reading!

When you manage websites on behalf of clients, it’s absolutely critical that those websites are up and running as much as possible. As such, you’ll need to keep a close eye on any possible issues and unexpected increases in traffic to make sure you’re prepared if anything happens.

This takes a lot of time and effort which you could rather use on being creative, building sites for other clients, and growing your business. Fortunately, autoscaling for WordPress is the perfect solution. It scales a website’s resources up or down based on the prevailing demand at any given time. 

But what is autoscaling for WordPress and how does it work? Let’s take a look. 

What Is Autoscaling For WordPress

Autoscaling for WordPress, as the name implies, is a feature you can use to scale WordPress websites either up or down automatically. This scaling will happen based on traffic or utilization levels or, in other words, the demand the website is experiencing. 

How It Works

The best way to illustrate how autoscaling for WordPress works is by using an example and comparing it to traditional WordPress hosting. 

Let’s assume that you want to host a WordPress website and you’ve found a hosting provider for it. Let’s say the hosting provider offers three packages. The first package costs $20 a month and has enough bandwidth available for 50,000 visitors per month. 

In turn, the second package costs $40 a month and has enough bandwidth available for 200,000 visitors per month. Finally, the last and most expensive package costs $60 a month and has enough bandwidth available for 500,000 visitors per month. 

Now, let’s say you’re conscious of your expenses, as any business owner should be, so you opt for the first, and also the cheapest, package. This means you’ll pay $20 a month, and you’ll be able to welcome 50,000 visitors to your WordPress website every month. 

After you’ve built your site and made it available online, everything goes well for a month, maybe two months, maybe even 6 months. But what happens if you exceed your bandwidth? In other words, what happens if you get more than 50,000 visitors? It’s simple, if you didn’t expect and prepared for it, your website will probably crash and be unavailable to your website’s visitors.

With autoscaling for WordPress, you’ll eliminate this problem. With autoscaling implemented, a copy or replica of your site will be created when your website needs more resources to deal with the traffic. In this way, your site will always be available no matter how many people visit it. 

It also eliminates the need for you to constantly monitor your website to check traffic and resource utilization levels and to manually respond to significant increases in traffic. This makes website management a lot easier, especially if you need to manage more than one site.

Benefits Of Autoscaling For WordPress

Now that you’ve seen what autoscaling for WordPress is and how it works, let’s look at some of the benefits you’ll enjoy when you make use of this feature. 

Availability

Obviously, one of the major benefits of autoscaling for WordPress is that the sites you build and manage for your clients will always be available. It does this in two ways. For one, unexpected increases in bandwidth that exceed the available resources of the site won’t cause it to crash. 

It also protects your clients’ websites against application, hardware, and network failures. It does this by monitoring and detecting cases of these issues and then closing and replacing unhealthy instances before they cause bigger failures. This provides increased levels of reliability and availability even when traffic is low. 

And this availability doesn’t come at the cost of consistently monitoring these sites to identify possible increases in traffic. This is invaluable when your clients’ websites’ workloads are fairly unpredictable. 

The increased availability ensures that you keep your clients satisfied, which means you’ll retain more of them and attract new customers through referrals. 

Cost

Arguably, one of the biggest benefits of autoscaling for WordPress is that it will enable you to save substantial amounts of money. Using our example above, let’s say you, in an attempt to reduce the risk of crashes, upgrade the hosting package to the mid-tier plan, which is priced at $40 per month. Now, you’ll have bandwidth capacity for 200,000 website visitors per month.

But, what if you only exceed 50,000 visitor once during the year and, even then, it doesn’t increase beyond 100,000 visitors? In this case, you’ll pay for more capacity than you really need. 

And this is where autoscaling for WordPress brings about significant savings. Because it’s able to scale the resources up according to the prevailing demand, you’ll never pay for resources you don’t use. 

But it goes further than this, however. Once again, using our example earlier, if you stay on the cheapest hosting package, you’ll still pay more than what you should if you only get a fraction of the website visitors the hosting package has resources for. 

Autoscaling also eliminates this problem because it’s not only able to scale resources up as demand requires, but also down. This means that, when traffic is low, all unnecessary instances of the website will be shut down.

Ultimately, with autoscaling for WordPress, you’ll only pay for the resources you use when running a WordPress site. 

Wonsta, The Best Autoscaling For WordPress Partner

Considering the benefits you’ll enjoy when using autoscaling on your websites, you probably want to implement it as soon as possible. When you do, it’s crucial that you find the right partner. And this is where Wonsta comes in. 

We provide premium Google Cloud hosting that’s optimized for WordPress. All websites include the latest WordPress, optimized Nginx setup, Redis cache, and many other high-quality services from Google Cloud. 

More importantly, when your websites need more resources to handle their demand, we will increase the number of replicas of your website automatically. We will also automatically close all unused resources, so you’ll always only pay for what you use.

To learn more about Wonsta and how it can help you manage your clients’ websites, sign up for free today and we’ll give you €25 in free credits to build your first site. We also offer free migration, so that you can migrate your websites to us and try our offering out for yourself.