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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T17:21:44+00:00

We are Web 2.0 company that built a hosted Content Management solution from the

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We are Web 2.0 company that built a hosted Content Management solution from the ground up using LAMP. In short, people log into our backend to manage their website content and then use our API to extract that content. This API gets plugged into templates that can be hosted anywhere on the interwebs.

Scaling for us has progressed as follows:

  1. Shared hosting (1and1)
  2. Dedicated single server hosting (Rackspace)
  3. 1 Web Server, 1 DB Server (Rackspace)
  4. 1 Backend Web Server, 1 API Web Server, 1 DB Server
  5. Memcache, caching, caching, caching.

The question is, what’s next for us? Every time one of our sites are dugg or mentioned in a popular website, our API server gets crushed with too many connections. Or every time our DB server gets overrun with queries, our Web server requests back up.

This is obviously the ‘next problem’ for any company like ours and I was wondering if you could point me in some directions.

I am currently attracted to the virtualization solutions (like EC2) but need some pointers on what to consider.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What/where/how to scale is dependent on what your issues are. Since you’ve been hit a few times, and you know it’s the API server, you need to identify what’s actually causing the issue.

    Is it DB lookup times?

    A volume of requests that the web server just can’t handle even though they’re shortlived?

    API requests take too long to process? (independent of DB lookups, e.g., does the code take a bit to run)?

    Once you identify WHAT the problem is, you should have a pretty clear picture of what you need to do. If it’s just volume of requests, and it’s the API server, you just need more web servers (and code changes to allow horizontal scaling) or a beefier web server. If it’s API requests taking too long, you’re looking at code optimizations. There’s never a 1-shot fix when it comes to scalability.

    The most common scaling issues have to do with slow (2-3 seconds) execution of the actual code for each request, which in turn leads to more web servers, which leads to more database interactions (for cross-server sessions, etc.) which leads to database performance issues. High performance, server independent code with memcache (I actually prefer a wrapper around memcache so the application doesn’t know/care where it gets the data from, just that it gets it and the translation layer handles DB/memcache lookups as well as populating memcache).

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