System Scalability

When you are starting out, the scalability of a solution is probably not the first thing in your mind. But scalability is an important consideration when your business grows. Below is an outline of some of the options that are available.

Hosting Options

Shared Account – For Small Businesses

This is the ideal, low cost way to get stared for SME’s. In our experience, a shared account is suitable for most online businesses.

What it means is that you rent space on a web server that hosts many other sites as well. The advantage is that the cost of operating the server can be shared by many sites. The disadvantage is that limited resources are available for your site.

Dedicated Hosting – For Large Businesses

Dedicated hosting means that you rent the entire server. This can be useful in these circumstances:

a) You operate a very popular site. The volume of traffic might just be too large to handle for a shared account.

b) You operate many small websites. It might be more cost-effective to rent an entire server, rather than having a shared account for each website.

Server Farm – Enterprise Solutions

If the volume of traffic is too high even for a dedicated server to handle, you will need to consider the use of several servers to host your site. This is really only required for the largest retailers. A simple server farm setup could look as follows:

Get Your Systems Right

Every company needs systems. Systems define the processes that are required to achieve a defined outcome. Systems don’t necessarily need to be computerised. Even if you are just moving around papers, you still need systems in place.

What Makes a Scalable System?

• A good system must be expandable when volumes increase. This can either be done by:
  • Adding raw power. For example, by adding more picking stations and more employees.
  • Further automating manual tasks. For example, by switching to real-time payment processing rather than manual offline payment processing through an in-store EFTPOS terminal.
• A good system consists of clearly defined processes that can be consistently replicated over and over again. Ideally, processes are automated. If not, they should be able to be carried out by staff with as little training as possible.