Boosting WordPress Site Performance with Auto Scaling: A Guide for Companies

Running a web hosting agency is an exciting challenge, especially considering all the different hosting scenarios you have to manage for your clients.

Imagine that your client’s website has significant fluctuations in traffic. Movement is usually within a manageable range, but spikes are difficult to compensate for.

Poor management of these scenarios leads to website downtime or underperformance, which leads to unhappy customers.

Auto-scaling hosting can eliminate these issues for you and your customers. Read on to learn more about how this solution improves performance for your customers, reduces hosting headaches for your company, and gives you another major selling point.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Auto-scaling is a feature that allows the hosting infrastructure to match the changing traffic demands of a customer’s website.

Whenever the incoming requests to the site increase to the point where it could cause problems, the auto-scaling hosting feature is activated. This increases the resources available to the web server to handle requests. This way, the website remains online and accessible. When traffic returns to normal, autoscaling restores the servers to their standard configuration.

Imagine an event space with overflow seating. The main seating area can accommodate all attendees for smaller events such as a school play or a local performance. However, when the main seats are filled due to a really popular concert, the overflow seats allow the venue to increase its capacity so more people can enjoy the show.

If an engineer designed the overflow lounge doors to automatically open when the main room nears full capacity, that would represent auto-scaling.

Auto-scaling is usually included in a hosting plan and requires no management from you. So, as a company, you can assure your customers that they’ll benefit from auto-scaling without taking any extra steps — not even downloading plugins or templates.

Website visitor requests are handled by the host server’s PHP workers. These are background processes that run on the server’s CPU. Auto-scaling increases and decreases the number of PHP workers according to the current request load.

For context, note that most hosting plans have a fixed number of PHP workers based on the plan type and pricing. Hosting plans aimed at small websites will have fewer PHP workers than plans aimed at large businesses with more complex websites.

Fixed headcount means that a client’s site can become overwhelmed when it receives many requests, usually from increased web traffic. When this happens, the site may become unresponsive because all workers are busy handling requests.

In contrast, a cloud server with auto-scaling hosting can detect these traffic spikes and their effect on the customer’s website. To avoid the site becoming completely unresponsive, the server will scale performance by deploying new PHP worker instances to handle the additional load.

This optimization is so fast and efficient that end users on the site don’t even notice that auto-scaling has started. The server continues to monitor site traffic. when it returns to normal, the number of PHP workers is reduced accordingly.

Some hosting providers use different methods to achieve automatic scaling of server resources in response to increasing web traffic.

One method is load balancing servers. These servers host multiple instances of your website on the same network and use an algorithm to distribute traffic between them. When there is an increase in traffic, its impact is distributed among the load balancers in the network.

Another option that performs a similar function is content delivery networks (CDNs). A CDN caches content from your website and stores it on multiple servers in key geographic locations. It then serves this content to visitors using the nearest cache server.

WordPress and WooCommerce are both PHP-based applications and pair well with auto-scaling.

Companies can provide their customers with scalable hosting packages that adapt to real-time web traffic requirements. So you’re probably thinking about what benefits and promises you can make to convert a prospect into a customer.

With that in mind, here are three reasons to consider a hosting provider that offers WordPress auto-scaling.

With auto-scaling, your customers won’t have to worry about changing their hosting package just to handle a spike in traffic.

Imagine an e-commerce business owner preparing for a big holiday sale. They expect traffic to increase significantly on sale day.

As a company trying to manage this influx of web visitors, your only option may be to insist that the owner change their hosting plan for additional resources so that the site is not overwhelmed. However, the owner pushes back because they won’t need the additional resources for the rest of the year, which wastes money and server allocation.

Doing this every time a website expects an increase in visitors can become tiresome in the long run. Auto-scaling eliminates this by adjusting to limited periods of increased traffic.

Auto-scaling also ensures that page load time and responsiveness don’t degrade after a large batch of requests.

This consistent web performance — even during high Internet traffic — is essential for businesses that depend on website visitors to generate revenue through advertising or sales.

Maintaining a consistent user experience means their customers don’t get frustrated and go elsewhere. After all, studies have shown that 74% of mobile web users are unwilling to wait more than five seconds for a web page to load.

The potential damage of a website outage is huge, ranging from lost revenue and potential customers to damage to your business reputation. With auto-scaling, you can drastically reduce the chance of downtime affecting your customers’ WordPress sites.

This saves you time for your hosting provider to work on a solution that either reduces the server load or eliminates the source of the malicious attack. With managed WordPress hosting plans from Liquid Web, customers are notified when auto-scaling usage begins and at regular intervals if usage continues.

The benefits of auto-scaling aren’t just for end users of hosting plans. For web hosting agencies, there are also several reasons why auto-scaling will be good for your business.

Auto-scaling means that as a web hosting provider, you don’t have to worry about your customers constantly asking you to upgrade or downgrade their hosting packages every time they experience more web traffic.

Auto Scaling Hosting will take care of all the work to ensure their websites stay online and accessible so you can focus on other aspects of your hosting business, such as marketing and customer relations.

With auto-scaling, you can offer simpler plans that adapt to multiple use cases instead of building multiple hosting plans to meet hyper-specific scenarios.

For example, you can have a lightweight hosting plan that works for a portfolio site that doesn’t expect a lot of traffic. The same plan could also work for a mom-and-pop online store that has spikes in traffic during the holiday season.

Despite the complexity required to implement a feature like auto-scaling, no one from your web hosting company needs to do anything to handle the hosting. Your web hosting service provider handles all configuration and administration for your auto-scaling servers.

In fact, if you work with a hosting provider like Liquid Web, you don’t just have access to the technical expertise needed to implement auto-scaling. You’ll also have a partner who understands your business needs and makes sure they’re met.

As an agency, you just need to emphasize the benefits of auto-escalating hosting plans that you can resell.

The advantages of autoscaling make it an obvious choice for customers who want reliable WordPress sites. That’s why it makes a lot of sense for companies to work with a provider that offers auto-scaling as a feature.

The affiliate program from Liquid Web offers access to lightning-fast hosting infrastructure designed with scalability, security and performance in mind. Partners also get a dedicated account manager and transparent pricing for all services.

Whether you want to resell managed hosting services for scalable WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento or custom web applications, you’ll have access to high-quality services and excellent technical support to help you achieve your goals.