Question
Should I use a Load Balancer or just scale my Droplet vertically?
- Posted on April 22, 2025
- Building a SaaSScalingLoad BalancingSaaSDroplets
Asked by Bobby Iliev
Recently I had a discussion with a friend who’s running a small SaaS on DigitalOcean, and we debated whether it’s better to add a Load Balancer and scale out horizontally with multiple Droplets, or just upgrade a single Droplet as traffic grows.
I figured it’s a common question, so wanted to share some thoughts and see what others think too!
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.
For me personally, if you’re just starting out or running a low-traffic app, vertical scaling (upgrading your Droplet to one with more RAM/CPU) is the simplest and most cost-effective option.
You don’t need to worry about complexity, and you can resize your Droplet in just a few clicks:
🔗 How to Resize a Droplet
However, if you’re expecting growth, uptime is critical, or you want to handle spikes in traffic more reliably, it’s time to think about horizontal scaling with a Load Balancer and multiple Droplets. This gives you:
Redundancy (if one Droplet goes down, traffic is routed to the others)
Better performance under load
Easier rolling updates and deployments
DigitalOcean’s Load Balancer is fully managed, supports health checks, HTTPS termination, and works out of the box: 🔗 DigitalOcean Load Balancers
Also, you could consider the new Droplet Autoscale Pools for Automatic Horizontal Scaling:
🔗 How to Use Droplet Autoscale Pools for Automatic Horizontal Scaling
If you’re running containers or microservices, you might also want to look at Kubernetes or the App Platform for autoscaling:
🔗 App Platform
🔗 Kubernetes on DigitalOcean
TL;DR Start with vertical scaling for simplicity. When you need high availability or expect heavier load, introduce a Load Balancer, auto scaling group and scale out.
A good approach initially would be to Dockerize your application so it is easier later on.