If the shop loads too slowly or even collapses under the weight of a rush of visitors, a lot of turnover is lost. A clever scaling of the servers provides a remedy.

If it is foreseeable that more visitors will come to the online shop during a certain period of time, the servers can be scaled in different ways. Server scaling ensures that the shop does not collapse under the load, even if the load fluctuates greatly. Benedikt Merl, Marketing Consultant at the e-commerce agency CreativestyleNow inform, explains how it works:

Basically, a distinction is made between scaling the server capacity planned in advance and timed, and dynamic scaling based on historical values.

That is the difference:

• Time-shifted scaling requires that the merchant can easily estimate how many more requests will arrive in the online shop. At the same time, it offers the advantage that no time is lost in configuring additional servers as requirements increase. If, for example, a fashion shop is about to launch a new TV campaign, three additional servers can be booked for a week for the time of the first broadcast to cope with the expected rush.
• The situation is different with dynamic scaling. This adjusts the resources based on past values if certain utilization criteria are exceeded or undercut. If a lamp shop experiences increasing demand every winter, the hosting bandwidth can be covered by dynamic provisioning in a consumption-optimized manner. This is recommended for constant user behaviour, as a certain configuration time is required for connecting additional resources.

The added value of scaling lies on both the user and the company side: it prevents long loading times or page crashes, so that users can shop without hindrance. For all shopsNow inform with strong fluctuations in traffic, automatic scaling of server performance is the most economical solution to withstand peaks.