Having a cluster that automatically scales up and down based on demand is great, but starting a new virtual machine takes a few minutes (~5-9minutes). This makes for a poor user experience when lots of users login at the start of a class or workshop. Luckily in this case we know when the herd is going to arrive and can scale up the cluster just before. To do this go to the admin panel of your hub https://hub.earthdatascience.org/<hubname>/hub/admin and start the servers for a large fraction of your users. This will trigger the scale up event and if you do this about 15minutes before the start of a class your cluster should be big and ready when students login.
https://hub.earthdatascience.org/<hubname>/hub/admin
One thing to keep in mind is that unused user servers will eventually be turned off again and the cluster will shrink down again. This means you can not scale up the cluster using this strategy many hours before class starts.