Growth Paths

We’re often asked to provision hosting environments that can handle any peak load. To do this we need a blank cheque and they’re often not available. Whether it’s peak load or just organic growth that you’re worried about, most applications don’t stay the same forever. Increasing traffic or increased functions on your website or application often require upgrades to the hosting environment. “Knowing” how much resources are required to stop a site buckling under load is an impossible question.

Every application and website is different. Two sites attracting the same number of visitors can place vastly different loads on the server resources. Consider:

  • Distribution of visitors over each 24 hour period – peak vs even spreads
  • The activitiy of each visitor, the number of pages they read, how quickly they move between them.
  • The work that’s involved in generating each page on the server side. A page that shows real-estate listings might require 100 times more work on the server side than a simple static text page.
  • The tools that have been used to build your website or application and how they were used again can change the load on the server by a factor of 100.
  • And finally the magic that your hosting company works, a well configured server and applications with smart allocations of hardware in the right places can drastically improve the efficiency of your server.

So how big should your server be is a "how long is a piece of string-type question. What’s most critical is that you’ve considered a growth path so that you know you can upgrade and how you will do it when the time comes.

Room to grow

  • Shared hosting
  • Virtual Private Server (VPS)
  • Dedicated server
  • Complex multi-server configurations


When selecting the hosting environment to start on, it’s import you choose that which best suits both your initial requirements and caters for any short term growth expectations. Migrating in less than 6 months is often more costly than paying for the increased capacity from the outset.

Whilst dedicated server and complex configurations offer more performance and capability, they also cost more. Anchor can work with you to find the right balance.

Smooth Migrations

  • No downtime
  • Anchor assists you
  • Loads of experience


We live and breath hosting and with every new customer brings a migration. When upgrading between hosting environments at Anchor we have a huge advantage that we know and control both the existing and the new environment.

We use our expertise to work with you to ensure migrations are performed without downtime and with controlled risks.

We don’t do this without you though. You (and your developer) know your application and are best placed to perform QA on the new environment.

Why upgrade?

  • Performance
  • Server load
  • Application support


Anchor monitors the load on all shared hosting environments and fully managed servers. In most cases when it’s time to upgrade Anchor will alert you.

Upgrades occur as a result of:

  • Increase in visitors or website traffic
  • Changes to the applications being hosted such as feature/functionality improvements, changes to the underlying technology associated with re-builds
  • A desire to improve website response times
  • Changes to the server applications required to operate the website

Upgrade the software first

  • Optimise software before hardware
  • Software gains are more exponential
  • Hardware gains are more linear


It’s easy to reach for more hardware to upgrade your website (and we make more money this way) but is usually the wrong place to start.

Characteristically exponential performance gains are available from a) tweaking the configuration of the applications which support your website and b) improving the code that runs your website. These are generally once off costs. Anchor has the expertise to help you customise your hosting environment to improve your application performance and is usually our preferred starting point.

Hardware upgrades will usually improve performance but often the gains are much less significant than those from software, and are constrained by the technology available at the time. Hardware upgrades represent recurring/ongoing cost increases.

Know what to upgrade

  • Application analysis
  • Performance trending
  • Availability reporting


Once the software has been optimised, hardware upgrades may still be warranted. In your server there are three core components affecting performance:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • I/O

Each is used in different ways and often independently. To get the most bang for your buck it’s important to upgrade the component(s) which will have the most impact on performance. Worse still, upgrading a component which isn’t a bottleneck may even have NO effect on performance.

Anchor will assist you by profiling and diagnosing your server load constraints. We continuously and proactively monitor and perform trend utilisation of these components on our fully managed support packs.