In today's digital-first world, website performance is critical to customer experience and business success. Many businesses, especially those with fluctuating traffic, struggle to ensure their websites stay online and responsive during peak demand periods. One of our clients came to us with this exact problem - their website, hosted on a Virtual Machine (VM), couldn't handle heavy traffic and had crashed during key moments.
The Problem: Crashes During High Traffic
The client was concerned that their website, which was hosted on a VM, wouldn't be able to handle high-traffic scenarios. In the past, their site had gone down during traffic surges, leading to frustrated users, missed opportunities, and potential revenue losses. Hosting on a VM posed a limitation: the infrastructure was built to handle a predetermined load, and when demand exceeded that capacity, the system would fail.
This issue was particularly concerning for the client, who anticipated spikes in website traffic due to a major event on the horizon. They needed a solution that would scale with demand while ensuring continuous uptime, even at the highest traffic peaks.
The Solution: Moving to Azure App Services with Autoscaling
Our solution was to move the client's website hosting to Azure App Services with autoscaling capabilities. Azure App Services is a cloud platform that simplifies hosting, offering built-in scaling options that adapt to real-time needs.
We implemented autoscaling so that if the site experienced a surge in traffic and CPU usage crossed a predefined threshold, Azure would automatically spin up new instances to meet the demand. This way, the site could dynamically adjust its capacity without human intervention, ensuring optimal performance under the heaviest loads. With a VM setup, this level of scalability would have been nearly impossible to achieve.
Once the migration was complete and autoscaling was set up, we conducted stress tests during periods of high traffic. Even during the most intense load, the website maintained excellent performance and uptime - solving the client's core issue.
The Lesson: Smarter Resource Management with Autoscaling
This experience taught us a valuable lesson about the inefficiencies of traditional VM hosting compared to cloud-based solutions. When using a VM, businesses have to configure the machine with the most powerful specifications they can afford to prepare for the highest possible workload. However, most of the time, that excess processing power goes unused, leading to wasted resources and cost inefficiencies.
With Azure App Services and autoscaling, businesses can specify just the computing power they need for day-to-day operations and allow Azure to automatically scale up when demand increases. This flexibility ensures you're only paying for the resources you actually use while avoiding downtime during traffic surges.
Final Thoughts
At Visus LLC, we pride ourselves on helping clients tackle challenges with innovative, future-proof solutions. For businesses anticipating varying website traffic, cloud hosting with autoscaling is an ideal approach. It offers the flexibility to handle both normal and peak usage seamlessly, ensuring a better user experience and more efficient resource management.
If your business is struggling with website performance during high traffic periods, contact us to learn more about how we can help you implement scalable, reliable solutions like Azure App Services.