9 Strategies to Scale Your Web App in 2024

Scaling your web application isn’t just about accommodating more users—it’s about maintaining performance, reliability, and user experience as your business expands. And that’s easier said than done.

Whether you’re steering a scrappy startup or helming or an established scaleup, growth is essential—more users diving into your app, fresh faces subscribing to your SaaS solution, or a steadily swelling stream of revenue from your flagship offerings. As your business expands, your web application needs to keep pace, scaling efficiently to handle greater traffic, data processing, and user interactions without compromising performance or user experience.

Even smaller businesses can see dramatic growth in short periods. Your app might suddenly go viral on TikTok, get a shoutout from an influencer, or be featured in a popular tech newsletter. These events can catapult your user base overnight, turning your steady trickle of sign-ups into a flood. Such rapid expansion puts your infrastructure to the test. Your backend systems must be ready to flex and adapt, ensuring your app remains snappy and responsive even as user numbers soar. Read on for practical strategies to scale your web application’s architecture, optimize database performance, and implement efficient caching mechanisms—ensuring your business can handle explosive user growth without sacrificing speed or reliability.

What is web app scaling?

Web app scaling is the process of expanding your application’s capacity to handle increased load and user demand. It’s about making your web application more robust, efficient, and capable of serving a growing number of users without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Scaling is all about resource management. As your user base grows, so does the strain on your servers, databases, and other infrastructure components. Scaling strategies distribute this load by increasing the power of individual components or by adding more components to share the work.

However, it’s more than just adding additional servers or boosting processing power. It often involves optimizing your application’s code, streamlining database queries, implementing caching mechanisms, and sometimes even rethinking your application’s architecture.

The goal is to create a system that can grow seamlessly with your business needs.

Types of web application scaling

There are three primary types of web application scaling:

1. Vertical scaling

2. Horizontal scaling

3. Diagonal scaling

Vertical scaling

Vertical scaling, also known as “scaling up,” involves increasing the power of individual servers in your system. This typically means adding more CPU, RAM, or storage to your existing machines. Vertical scaling is often the simplest approach because it doesn’t require major changes to your application’s architecture.

Horizontal scaling

Horizontal scaling, or “scaling out,” involves adding more servers to your infrastructure to distribute the load. Instead of making one server more powerful, you’re increasing your capacity by using multiple servers to handle requests.

Diagonal scaling

Diagonal scaling is a hybrid approach that combines elements of both horizontal and vertical scaling. It involves both upgrading existing servers and adding new ones to the system.

How to scale your web app

Before we explore specific strategies, it’s crucial to understand that scaling is not a one-size-fits-all process. The best approach for your application will depend on its architecture, current performance bottlenecks, and anticipated growth patterns. A successful scaling strategy often involves a combination of techniques applied thoughtfully over time. Here are a few to explore:

1. Optimize your database

Start by indexing frequently accessed columns to speed up query execution. Implement database sharding to distribute data across multiple servers, reducing the load on any single server. Use database caching to store frequently accessed data in memory, minimizing repeated database calls.

Consider the following tips:

• Regularly analyze and optimize your queries

• Use connection pooling to manage database connections efficiently

• Implement database partitioning for large tables

• Choose the right database type for your needs (SQL vs. NoSQL)

2. Implement caching

Caching is a reliable way to reduce server load and improve response times. It helps reduce the number of database queries and computations your app needs to perform by storing frequently accessed data in a fast-access layer.

Scalable caching strategies include:

• Browser caching: Store static assets on the user’s device

• CDN caching: Cache content closer to users geographically

• Application caching: Store computed results in memory

• Database query caching: Save results of common queries

While caching can dramatically improve performance, it also introduces complexity in managing data consistency. Carefully plan your caching strategy to avoid serving stale data to users.

3. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

A CDN boosts your web app’s performance and scalability by distributing your content across multiple, geographically diverse servers. When a user requests content, it’s served from the nearest CDN server, reducing latency and improving load times.

To implement a CDN effectively:

• Choose a CDN provider that aligns with your geographical needs

• Configure your app to use the CDN for static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript)

• Consider using the CDN for dynamic content caching where appropriate

4. Deploy load balancers

Load balancers distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers to improve your web app’s availability, scalability, and reliability. They prevent any single server from becoming overwhelmed by directing requests to the most appropriate web server.

There are a few types of load balancing options to choose from, but none of them is necessarily better than another—they just serve different needs and use cases:

• Round-robin: Requests are distributed sequentially across the server pool

• Least connections: New requests go to the server with the fewest active connections

• IP hash: Requests from the same IP address are consistently sent to the same server

5. Adopt microservices architecture

Microservices architecture breaks down your application into smaller, independently deployable services. This helps you easily scale individual components as needed, improve fault isolation, use different technologies for different services, and accelerate development and deployment cycles.

First, you’ll need to identify logical boundaries in your application and design services around specific business capabilities. Next, you’ll need to implement inter-service communication (often using REST APIs or message queues).

Consider using containerization technologies like Docker to maintain consistent deployment across different environments. This approach allows each microservice to be developed, deployed, and scaled independently for greater flexibility and resilience for your scalable web app as a whole.

6. Use cloud services

Using cloud services offers a more efficient and flexible approach to scaling compared to on-premise solutions. Cloud platforms provide on-demand resources, allowing you to quickly adjust your infrastructure as your needs change, without the upfront costs and maintenance overhead of physical hardware. This means you can scale up during traffic spikes and scale down during quieter periods, optimizing your resource usage and costs.

Cloud providers offer a wide range of tools specifically designed for scalability, including auto-scaling groups, load balancers, and managed databases. These services can automatically adjust your resources based on predefined metrics, ensuring your application remains responsive under varying loads.

For example, you can use DigitalOcean for the following:

• Droplets for scalable virtual machines

• App Platform for automated deployment and scaling of applications

• Spaces for scalable object storage

• Managed Kubernetes for container orchestration

• Auto-scaling groups for handling traffic spikes

• Managed databases for easier data management

• Serverless computing for cost-effective, scalable backend services

7. Leverage asynchronous processing

Asynchronous processing improves your scalable web applications by handling time-consuming tasks in the background (separate from the main request-response cycle). Instead of processing everything immediately when a request comes in, your app queues certain tasks to be handled later. This allows your app to respond quickly to user requests while processing heavy tasks in the background.

You can use this for tasks like sending emails, generating reports, processing uploaded files, or updating search indexes.

8. Implement auto-scaling

Auto-scaling automatically adjusts your web apps’ resources based on current demand. It helps maintain performance during traffic spikes while optimizing costs during quieter periods.

Here’s how how auto-scaling works:

• Monitors key metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, or request rates

• Adds more instances when demand increases

• Removes instances when demand decreases

Most cloud providers offer auto-scaling services—like DigitalOcean’s Autoscale feature for Droplets. When setting up auto-scaling, start conservatively and adjust based on observed performance and costs.

9. Use a distributed database

A distributed database system spreads data across multiple servers to improve performance, reliability, and scalability of your web application.

Common types of distributed databases:

1. Shared databases: Data is split across multiple servers based on a shard key

2. Replicated databases: Multiple copies of data are maintained across servers

3. Distributed NoSQL databases: Designed for scalability and flexible data models

When implementing a distributed database, choose a distribution model that aligns with your data access patterns and implement robust data consistency mechanisms to maintain integrity across nodes. Plan for data migration and potential schema changes.

Scale your web application with DigitalOcean

Prepare to scale your web application well before you actually need it. You never know when your user base might start expanding or traffic spikes may occur.

And we can help.

DigitalOcean provides a range of tools and services designed to make scaling your web application simpler and more cost-effective. Our cloud platform offers:

• Droplets: Scalable virtual machines for flexible deployment

• App Platform: Fully managed platform for automatic scaling of containerized apps

• Managed Databases: Easily scalable database solutions

• Kubernetes: Managed container orchestration for microservices

• Load Balancers: Distribute traffic efficiently across your infrastructure

• Spaces: Object storage for your growing data needs

Whether you’re a startup looking to scale your first application or an established business aiming to optimize your infrastructure, DigitalOcean has the solutions to support your growth at any stage.

Sign up for DigitalOcean today and start building a more scalable, reliable, and efficient web application.