Hello Pleskians! This week we’re back with the seventh episode of the Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops. In this installment, Superhost Joe welcomes back Jan Loeffler, Plesk’s CTO and Tech Mage, to talk about optimizing and scaling your hosting.
In This Episode: the TikTok Effect, Jan’s Downtime Checklist and When to Scale
What do we mean by scaling and why should you be thinking about it? What do you do if you suddenly become popular on TikTok and visitors are streaming to your website? Before you scale online, what is the first thing you should be doing? Jan and Joe answer these questions and more in the latest Next Level Ops episode.
Avoiding downtime is the first thing you should be considering, according to Jan. “Downtime is the worst problem for your business. Because that means that customers are not able to visit your site anymore,” says Jan. “Most of the downtime is not happening due to the hosting stack or the hosting infrastructure. Usually, downtime happens more often from the user.”
Before you consider scaling and performance tuning, make sure that you have a process in place for:
- Disaster recovery and creating regular backups.
- Not making changes on a live site and using tools that provide you with test environments.
- Making sure that your website is fast because businesses lose revenue when sites take more than 3 seconds to load.
- Not using “too poor” hardware and always making sure that you have enough server capacity left.
- Profiling your server and site activity by using performance monitoring tools to find out where your bottlenecks are.
To get the best out of scaling your hosting, make sure you follow Jan’s Downtime Checklist above. And remember, “It’s also like running a marathon. You shouldn’t always run at the limit because afterwards you’ll get a cold.” says Jan.
Wise words.
To check out Jan’s previous feature, go here to learn all about optimizing your website (and get bonus training tips for your next big marathon).
“Downtime is the worst problem for your business. Because that means that customers are not able to visit your site anymore. Most of the downtime is not happening due to the hosting stack or the hosting infrastructure. Usually, downtime happens more often from the user.”
Key Takeaways
- What’s the Downtime Checklist? Before scale and tuning websites, make sure that the user is not contributing to downtime. Have access to regular backups, test environments, good hardware and monitoring tools.
- Speeding up your website and caching. Everything that helps you reduce database calls is your first priority. The second priority is to reduce processing PHP. It’s even faster when you don’t need to call up your web server. This is possible through the Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can use the Speed Kit to speed up your website.
- Scaling your website. A website should usually be able to handle 200 requests per second. If you’re scaling your business or brand, make sure whether you need a static or a dynamic website. If you run an ecommerce website, then you need horizontal scaling.
…Alright Pleskians, it’s time to hit the play button if you want to hear the rest. If you’re interested in hearing more about site optimization, cloud services and WordPress hosting, check out the rest of our Next Level Ops episodes. We’ll be back soon with the next installment.
The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring
Joe is a college-accredited course developer. He is the founder of Creator Courses.
Jan Loeffler
Jan is the Chief Technical Officer at Plesk.
As always, remember to update your daily podcast playlist with Next Level Ops. And stay on the lookout for our next episode!
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