Maybe you have a seasonal business running a WooCommerce shop, or you are gearing up for a special promotional sales event to draw more interest and sales to your website. No matter the reason, our team of experienced WordPress engineers are here to work with you to determine the appropriate action plan for scaling your traffic with ease.

Every Pagely site is built from the ground up to scale — by having separate web serving and database layers, and by using multiple layers of caching technology — so even without accounting for special one-off events, your Pagely site is optimized to scale well. A well-cached Pagely site can handle thousands of requests per minute, with no hard limit on page views.

Pre-Planning Steps

If available, it is beneficial for us to have an estimate on traffic expectations. Some helpful example questions our team might ask:

• What is the expected duration of the spike?
• How many active visitors may be hitting the site at once?
• How many subscribers will receive your promotional email?
• What types of website functions will your users be using?

All current customer communication will be started from a support ticket filed right from your Pagely Atomic dashboard. Once our Ops experts have a handle on expectations, we will review the current usage on your server and verify whether an upgrade is needed and what options are best based on those figures you have shared.

Evaluating Your Dedicated VPS

Each WordPress app is assigned a dedicated pool of PHP workers to process any dynamic (non-cacheable) content being served. Any cacheable content will be served directly by NGINX, and won’t invoke PHP (i.e., these cached requests will not add workload your server).

Requests from logged-in users, cache misses, and POST requests to /admin-ajax.php all rely on PHP workers to render your site, so the nature of your site can make a big difference in how scalable your site is.

Not only is NGINX the trusted high-performance software used on the Pagely platform, they’re also a loyal customer of ours. Read our Case Study to see what unique challenges we were able to solve for NGINX.

Flexibility and 24/7 Monitoring

Amazon Web Services allows us the flexibility to boost your resources amongst our various plans easily by using their EC2 technology. Some hosts lock you into contracts with difficult plan change processes. At Pagely, we can Temporarily Resize your VPS to whichever plan yields the proper resource backing to weather your traffic storms comfortably. We simply prorate your billing, charging you only for what you use. That means a better cost-benefit savings to you, the customer.

Let’s say traffic exceeded the original optimistic forecasts we planned for. Pagely provides 24/7 Uptime Monitoring with preset alerts for reaching critical CPU thresholds. This allows us to be proactive for ensuring a smooth ride for your visitors. While scaling your traffic, you can trust us to keep an attentive eye on performance.

Additional Assurances

Load testing is another excellent tool for gaining greater clarity around your usage thresholds against your current VPS plan. Our customers and agency partners regularly make use of tools like K6 to make sure their sites can handle any load. We work with our customers to troubleshoot and optimize your setup for maximum capacity.

Important Note: Typically, we encourage customers to allow us at least a 24 hour advanced notice of any relevant changes so we have enough time to prepare each step involved. We also understand planning ahead is not always possible, so our team can make any emergency resizes when necessary — including the use of pre-authorization for temporary server upsizes.