In this chapter, we will not be discussing Goophr but instead a simple web application for blogging so that we can concentrate on scaling it for the web. Such an application may consist of a single server instance running the database and the blog server.

Scaling a web application is an intricate topic, and we will devote a lot of time to this very subject. As we shall see throughout this section, there are multiple ways to scale a system:

• Scaling the system as a whole
• Splitting up the system and scaling individual components
• Choosing specific solutions to better scale the system

Let's start with the most basic setup, a single server instance.