Network Infrastructure Strategies

A thorough analysis of current system capacity is helpful in assessing immediate performance capacity. However, to be well prepared, the Development team must come up with an array of likely requirement scenarios based on the new web site's projected success and develop strategies for each of these scenarios. Such strategies are typically based on low, medium, and high projections of visitor traffic.
Strategies address questions like: What upgrades are likely if an extremely high volume of visits occur? What about medium volume? A well designed strategy provides flexibility into the design of the proposed upgrades and should aim at enabling each progressive upgrade to be built on the infrastructure of the previous upgrade whenever possible.

A site's growth strategy doesn't have to be limited to in-house hardware or software upgrades. Many popular sites utilize a technique called mirroring, which diverts user loads across several regionally dispersed sites. Click the following mirror-traffic to see an illustration of what mirroring is and how it is used.

Another technique to handle increased traffic is to rent peak load mirror sites or peak load bandwidth (additional pipes) which automatically kick-in when the site's volume reaches a specified level.
Finally, for small and mid-sized needs, many organizations are turning to large web hosting services. These hosting services rent their servers and bandwidth to organizations at a fraction of the cost otherwise required. Due to the economy of scale, these hosting services (who typically host thousands of web sites), can provide the support staff, bandwidth, and peak load mirroring strategies previously available to only the very largest companies.
In the next lesson, you will learn how to manage risks as you plan your network needs.