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How to Scale a Product and Not Lose Your Mind: 5 Essential Tips

Do you plan to scale your software product? If so, we have good news and bad news for you. Let’s start with the good: the need for product scaling means that your software is successful—you’ve managed to create an in-demand solution and increase your customer base. Well done! Yet, software scaling can become a real pain in the neck, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s the bad news. To help you live through the scaling process and ensure you do everything right, AnyforSoft is here with a brand-new article. In the following paragraphs, we describe valuable tips on how to scale a product so that it meets the ever-growing market needs while continuing to solve your customers’ problems. Enjoy! What is Product Scaling? What does it mean to scale a product? In simple terms, software product scaling is the process of expanding the software’s capabilities so that it manages to handle the growing requests and demands of your users. The idea behind it is to make your solution robust enough to ensure that it delivers a smooth user experience, covers the expected demands, and can adapt to unexpected ones. Note that sometimes when people talk about product scaling they imply expanding the capabilities of a business by improving the team, products and services, company infrastructure, marketing strategies, and so on. This article focuses on software scaling. To clear things up, let’s provide a real-life example. Enter Chess.com—the most popular platform for playing chess online. The app was doing pretty well until one fateful day in October 2020, The Queen Gambit show was released and changed everything. Soon after that, the popularity of chess skyrocketed, leading to hundreds of thousands of new users creating accounts on Chess.com. That overloaded the platform, causing multiple bugs and even software crashes. Talk about unexpected demands! So the platform’s creators had only one choice—to scale the product in order to meet the increased demand and not lose their customers. Luckily, this story has a happy ending—the software development team managed to expand their software’s capabilities, and now Chess.com handles over 10,000,000 games daily. Of course, that’s a very extreme example, but it illustrates the following point perfectly: in order to stay afloat, you should be able to scale your product whenever such a need arises. Keep reading to learn more. Types of Product Scaling You can scale software products by using vertical scaling (also called scale-up) or horizontal scaling (or scale-out). The difference between the two lies in the way they are implemented. Vertical Scaling Vertical scaling involves adding more resources to an existing server to improve its capabilities. For instance, you may increase its RAM. CPU, disk capacity, and so on. In some cases, you change the server entirely to receive the one with better specifications and upgrading options. Pros: Faster response times due to no synchronized nodes across multiple servers. Less room space is required compared to horizontal scaling (power bills are also lower). Better data consistency and integrity as everything runs on a single node. Easy to implement since there is no need to use load balancers. Cons: Upgrading options are limited since each device has a threshold for RAM, storage, and processing power. Connecting your software to a new server requires you to shut the system down for a while. Higher possibility of service downtime as you rely on one machine that acts as a single point of failure (SPOF). Increased risk of permanent data loss since all the data is stored on one server.