Improve your Web-Server's reliability and avoid downtime or slowness

If you are running a SAAS solution or business grade e-commerce site you will know the frustration of having your sites go down or even just being slow when there is high demand. In many cases your online presence is your business..

If the Web-Server or Web-Server hosting company you are using is unable to improve things for you, you may want to consider moving to AWS and potentially from a single mono-lithic architecture to a multi-tier, service-based architecture. How does this help? Well first, lets look at what each of these terms mean.

Mono-lithic simply means that all of the components required for a Web-Server's function is housed within a single Linux distribution or Windows Server. It lacks capabilities like scalability and redundancy. The separate components are also not able to be easily maintained without impacting the others.

Components would include webserver software (eg. Apache), the Linux distributions or Windows Servers, management tools (eg WordPress) and customer code (eg PHP) as well as Databases and FileStores.

The multi-tier architecture in contrast decouples the components to independently scalable application components which can be separately developed, managed, and maintained. This would include the web-servers themselves, the databases, the file storage and also allows for the addition of load balancers and auto-scalers.

So how does this help?

Once the separate components have been migrated from the single Web-Server environment to multiple cloud services the reliability and availability of the websites hosted within that environment are significantly improved. Single points of failure have been reduced, scalability has been introduced and each component is being individually managed in terms of backups, performance optimisation and ongoing maintenance.

If you have concerns about your website performance and would like to explore ways to develop a multi-tier architecture we can help.