Scale
My life of recent has had a lot of scale issues… It started with the NFL Excel spread sheet I made, the progressed into an issue at work, and now has popped it’s ugly head up on the sites I run. The later has a lot of immediate needs….
The Excel spread sheet is fine for 5-10 users after that it gets messy to use. Work was an issue of tracking business and in a down economy that is a fun problem to have. Now the sites I run have scaled up near the peak of a shared hosting account.
It looks like I have to migrate from a nice cheap $5 dollar a month shared account at a crap host to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). The main issues are “how much more work” is maintaining a VPS and ensuring I get a decent setup. There are a lot of catches, like the connection you get (10 or 100Mbit), the amount of ram (128-512), the amount of processer time (.4-2Ghz), bandwidth per month (10-1000 GB), and the hardest issue to resolve: the control panel (Cpanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk). I am currently looking at KnownHost.com and VPS.net as my future providers. Both seem to be well recommended, especially KnownHost.com, but I don’t need another “M6.net” in my life. Which I would recommend you stay away from that crap host and considering I use 1and1.com now, that is saying a lot.
So back to scale… If there is one thing I have learned it is that what fits small setup or low use, does not tend to translate to a large use. Let’s take the Excel spread sheet as an example. With the user selection going horizontal, it makes it a hard to see the teams when you are player number 20, 30, 40 or 50. And with there being two columns per user (team/count) this makes a 10 user setup on 20 columns and 50 user setup 100 column. That makes user 50 in columns DZ or such. Which is cumbersome and not very user friendly. I did not consider large use to the spread sheet when I made it, so expansion is difficult.
Thinking about expansion and much larger use is critical to programming or even just laying out a menu at a restaurant. Today that restaurant may serve sandwiches for lunch and dinner, but what if they choose to offer breakfast or dinner meals. Just go to a fast food restaurant and look at how compacted the menu is on the wall. You could go to any family restaurant and see how it has expanded over time to offer many meals and that they can be very diverse.
These issues happen in business dealings and even our personal life. So next time you make a quick decision to do something, think about the “what if” scenario of if you have to scale it beyond any expectation. It can become an interesting exercise in mechanics, ergonomics and thought. It is more than just planning for the future, it is planning beyond expectations and planning for a “what if”.
Related posts:
- 2009 NFL Excel Spreadsheet (Free)
- Update to the Free 2009 NFL Spread Sheet Calculator
- Excel: Data Validation
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-27
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-13