Every day a new mobile app or website launches that has the potential to be a game changer. If you browse the list of startups at places like TechStars, Y Combinator, and TechCrunch’s Distrupt, you will see dozens of ideas that affect the way consumers use and interact with information and media. Many of them fail. However, many succeed and grow so quickly that they have to focus on the behind the scenes scalability of the service.
One example of a startup success story is Mint.com, who we interviewed on our Red Couch in its early days. The financial aggregator, now owned by Intuit, launched at a TechCrunch event in 2007. The attention that the site garnered led to an avalanche of new users. Today, the site has 5 million users. It needs more server capacity and speed than anyone would have guessed just a few years ago. As the site grew, the scale did as well. It quickly adapted for its many users.
On the other side of the spectrum, Twitter grew at an unprecedented rate after it launched in 2006. Unlike Mint, Twitter experienced growing pains. The site was not built to scale as quickly as it needed to. Regular users, fondly known as Tweeple, became well acquainted with the “fail whale,” an over capacity error when Twitter’s servers were buckling under the pressure.
Sites like Mint and Twitter, and many others, have learned about scale when building an online business. As a webmaster myself, I know the painful feeling of going to my website to find an error message. Every failed click is a potential lost customer. This is an annoyance for me, but can be devastating for entrepreneurial ventures on the web.
To avoid your own version of the dreaded fail whale, it is important to plan well ahead of your needs. When building your site, use compression and server caching to speed up load times for your visitors. At the early stages of a web business, that may be all you need to keep up with demand. However, as your site grows and you move from shared hosting to a virtual private server to a dedicated server, you will be confronted with many choices for future hosting.
Content heavy sites like Netflix and Hulu rely on a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure their content is delivered to their customers as quickly as possible. Level 3’s CDN offers an intelligent hosting solution where users around the world are given the content from a server geographically closer than a central hosting option could offer. This cuts precious seconds of load time when impatient customers may choose to go elsewhere.
I recently discovered a new music site called Turntable.fm. Currently in a private beta, the developers have decided to artificially limit growth. So far, the site has been holding up to the demand. However, when the floodgates open and a wave of new users joins, they will need a high powered network to deliver music to your speakers.
Even smaller sites, such as the well known site ProBlogger, use a CDN to ensure readers around the world get their content delivered quickly and seamlessly. One well written post on the site discusses optimization and the benefits of a CDN.
If you have questions about how a CDN works, be sure to send us a Tweet or get in touch with someone about turning your site into a high performance website.
Who knows? Maybe your company is the next Facebook. Are you ready to scale?
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