Scale PHP and MySQL

Most of time, online businesses just start as a concept of consciousness in the mind of businessmen, and before having even one user they often carried out their ideas on a single server or a small cluster to save budget.

Actually, this is effectual, even Google, the giant of the datacenters world, started off this way. Its original hardware did not impress anyone, but Google dominated the search engine market and occupied enormous datacenters with bespoke server designs in less than 5 years.

Although on a smaller scale, it can still get there smoothly if business owners consider scaling from their original servers to something that could handle far greater loads. Scaling plan should be worked out in advance, otherwise it would be more difficult and more costly than necessary.

Load a server up with more hardware or move to more powerful machines gradually is a way to scale. However, this way has obvious restrictions and can be needlessly expensive.

For those startups which plan to scale their infrastructure from the inception of their business, PHP and MySQL are truly excellent foundations that are well-suited for building applications, and can effectively help the startups to grow.

Here are three main aspects that business owners should take into consideration when planning for scaling their startups’ infrastructures.

Software Stack

It is quite essential to choose the suitable software stack for smooth scaling. For instance, if they decide to choose to base their web applications on PHP and MySQL but fail to use a control panel, which allows for the easy addition of extra MySQL server nodes and load balancing between them, their business would face a tough growth.

Caching

Caching is needed in most websites, and is also used by millions of webmasters. It could be implemented at various points in a website or application’s infrastructure to improve the current hardware performance. If business owners use PHP and MySQL, they have to know:

  • Memcached: a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that can run on Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Memcached is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data resource must be read.
  • Alternative PHP Cache (APC): a free, open source framework that heavily optimizes and increases the performance of PHP applications by caching the operation codes of frequently executed PHP functions.

Clustering

Quickly add relatively low-cost nodes and load balance is the key of scaling strategy, and MySQL can be simply configured to reading for numbers of servers and writing for webmasters. As the result, PHP and MySQL is a perfect combination if business owners plan for horizontal scaling to remain constant growth, as well as save budget.