1. Measure before you tune
Establish baselines for CPU, memory, disk I/O, network throughput and application response time. Without them it is impossible to know whether a change helped. Tune the largest bottleneck first; others often disappear.
2. Right-size the hardware
Match resources to the workload. Databases usually need memory and fast storage; compute-heavy services need cores and clock speed. Modern CPUs and NVMe SSD storage remove many I/O limits that cripple older disks.
3. Optimise the database
- Add indexes for frequent queries and review slow-query logs.
- Size buffer and cache memory appropriately.
- Move heavy reporting to replicas where possible.
4. Cache aggressively
Cache at several layers: application objects in memory, rendered pages, and static assets through HTTP caching headers and a content delivery network. Every request served from cache is one your server does not compute.
5. Tune the web and application tier
- Enable compression and modern protocols such as HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.
- Set sensible worker and connection limits for your RAM and CPU.
- Keep runtimes, frameworks and libraries up to date.
6. Reduce latency with placement
Network distance matters. Host close to your users or data, and consider multiple locations for global audiences.
7. Monitor continuously
Alert on saturation and error rates, not only outages. Use trends to plan capacity before limits are reached. Our managed hosting service includes 24/7 monitoring, patching and ongoing tuning if you would rather not run this yourself.
8. Design for availability
Remove single points of failure: redundant services, tested backups and a documented recovery process turn a hardware fault into a minor event.