This is the culmination of months of work by our engineers to solve some very difficult technical challenges (which someone smarter than me will cover in another post). In short, with Convesio you can set and manage a true Scalable WordPress Site via our upgraded dashboard.
You can set the minimum and a maximum number of containers for a website to run on as well as the resource thresholds that trigger scaling. You can scale a website manually too.
Before I show you how to set up a scalable WordPress website, let me explain what true auto-scaling is. Admittedly, there are different approaches to achieve auto-scaling and other providers do a good job at that. Convesio’s approach is unique, though:
- Convesio scales websites by deploying and removing Docker containers on the fly when additional resources are needed
- Containers deploy horizontally across physical servers too. This means that if a server is full, the next container will be deployed to another one.
The platform was architected to support this right from the start. Check out the features for more detail about how it all works.
With the new release of our dashboard, you now have the DIY controls to set up and manage a highly scalable hosting environment for your WordPress site. We get a lot of customers telling us that setting upscaling on other platforms takes hours or even days and that there is always a negotiation with Sales. By the time additional resources are added, they are not needed anymore.
The (use) case for auto-scaling WordPress
If you’re running a personal blog or even a low-traffic brochure company website it’s unlikely that you’ll need scaling. Just sign up with a decent shared hosting provider and get a CDN to handle any heavy lifting.
If downtime or slow-loading pages impacts your business then you should host on a platform that can help mitigate those risks. The types of businesses that fall in this category are:
- WooCommerce stores are happily sitting on a VPS until a Black Friday-type event happens.
- eLearning and membership sites that need to handle large volumes of logins and interactions on a schedule
- Event sites like the WP Agency Summit 2021 which we hosted (check this video to learn how we did it)
- Agencies building client websites and landing pages that need to handle campaign traffic
- Publishers needing extra grunt for all the scripts they run and wanting to avoid the pain of a slow WordPress admin
Convesio attracts a type of persona too: owners, marketers, and IT managers that want to avoid dealing with hosting altogether. They are after a solid solution and a partner they can trust.
Auto-scaling in action
Here’s a video we put together to show auto-scaling in action. Website load testing as part of this process to simulate traffic and trigger the spawning of new containers which will share the load.