By Bobby Iliev
Recently I had a discussion with a friend who’s running a small SaaS on DigitalOcean, and we debated whether it’s better to add a Load Balancer and scale out horizontally with multiple Droplets, or just upgrade a single Droplet as traffic grows.
I figured it’s a common question, so wanted to share some thoughts and see what others think too!
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For me personally, if you’re just starting out or running a low-traffic app, vertical scaling (upgrading your Droplet to one with more RAM/CPU) is the simplest and most cost-effective option.
You don’t need to worry about complexity, and you can resize your Droplet in just a few clicks:
However, if you’re expecting growth, uptime is critical, or you want to handle spikes in traffic more reliably, it’s time to think about horizontal scaling with a Load Balancer and multiple Droplets. This gives you:
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Redundancy (if one Droplet goes down, traffic is routed to the others)
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Better performance under load
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Easier rolling updates and deployments
DigitalOcean’s Load Balancer is fully managed, supports health checks, HTTPS termination, and works out of the box: 🔗 DigitalOcean Load Balancers
Also, you could consider the new Droplet Autoscale Pools for Automatic Horizontal Scaling:
🔗 How to Use Droplet Autoscale Pools for Automatic Horizontal Scaling
If you’re running containers or microservices, you might also want to look at Kubernetes or the App Platform for autoscaling:
TL;DR Start with vertical scaling for simplicity. When you need high availability or expect heavier load, introduce a Load Balancer, auto scaling group and scale out.
A good approach initially would be to Dockerize your application so it is easier later on.
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