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I am hosting a website that is currently run on Google Cloud Storage, and a completely static interface. I am considering upgrading it to allow for better plotting tools, which will require it to run a server, in this case a Java Servlet. The specific technology is Webmathematica, if it matters. My website hast mostly a steady demand averaging around 1K visitors at a time, but has had a peak of over 40K. My hunch is that a single server would not be enough to host such a service, that it would crash. Right now being hosted with a purely static website, I have been okay, but I'm worried about what might happen if I switch to a servlet system and I receive another huge spike in traffic.

What I would like to know is if there is a system in place that will allow me to host my website with java servlets that will scale as required. I would rather not pay for the high demand load all of the time, but I would like the option to turn on a few extra servers if the spare capacity should be required. I think I am okay if the site goes down for a minute while the servers turn on, but not much longer then that.

Is there such a host? What exactly is the name of this capacity so I can price things out? And is there anything else that I should know?

PearsonArtPhoto
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The rule of thumb would be to cache as much as you can. Preferably by one of the big CDN providers, like Akamai(expensive, but high quality), Cloudflare(free, but has it's issues), Fastly(I've no idea about this one).

How much of the content would be dynamic? Is it possible to have most stuff rendered client side via Javascript and provide data via cacheable JSON?

It's hard to say what would be the golden bullet here, with most of the stack being a big unknown.

If you're making money off of it, please at least get a second server to work as a cluster.

For the static site, it might be a good idea to move to s3 and host via cloudfront if possible.

Gothrek
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  • Right now everything is rendered client side via Javascript. I'm using Google Cloud Storage, which is basically Google's version of S3 (They gave me $300 in free credit, hard to turn that down). Hmmm... – PearsonArtPhoto Mar 01 '18 at 21:10
  • Ok, then skip the switch to S3 advice, as it's cheaper for you atm. Regarding the stack, if you switch to servlets, you need at least two servers. I have no idea about Webmathematica, but as it's java it will probably scale better horizontally, than vertically. It's possible to use AWS Autoscaling groups to achieve what you desire, with servers scaling with load, but that's not easy to setup corretly and there is a delay between load hitting and the increase in capacity, based on what's configured. – Gothrek Mar 01 '18 at 21:15
  • Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I'm realizing that Webmathematica isn't really my solution. It might have a few cool features, but... – PearsonArtPhoto Mar 01 '18 at 21:21
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    It MIGHT be possible to support such traffic using that specific solution, but that won't be cheap. – Gothrek Mar 01 '18 at 21:24