When you first choose a hosting plan, chances are high you opted for a shared hosting plan. Shared hosting plans are great because they are beginner-friendly and usually quite cheap. If your website stays small, shared hosting can be enough for a long time and you may never have to upgrade.
However, if your website starts to grow with more traffic, gets a lot of visitors at the same time, and gets content (hooray!), then you probably will have to think about upgrading your hosting plan.
Different kind of hosting plans
Before we jump into the question of when you should upgrade your hosting plan, it’s important to know the different hosting options available. Generally, hosting plans are divided into shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting.
Shared hosting is often seen as the most convenient, cheap, and beginner-friendly option. It’s a great option for new and small businesses.
With shared hosting, you rent a space on a shared server. This means that multiple different users use the same server and its resources. It’s a great choice if you’re just starting out and your website doesn’t get a ton of traffic.
However, shared hosting does come with a couple of limitations. Sharing a server and its resources means that the behavior of others can influence your websites’ performance. Furthermore, shared hosting is often less secure and less adaptable to your websites’ development. With shared hosting, there is often not a lot of room to grow.
If you’ve been running your website for a while, it might be time to upgrade to dedicated hosting or VPS hosting. More on these two later.
Managed plans
Upgrading your hosting plan might sound a bit complicated and intimidating. However, Hostio Solutions offers plenty of managed hosting plans. This means that we take care of all the technical aspects of your website, so you can focus on your business.
How to upgrade your hosting plan
It’s important to plan ahead and choose the right hosting package from the start. If your website is ready for bigger and better things, you’ve probably decided it’s time to upgrade. If you’re happy with your current hosting provider, the best thing to do is to contact them and see which options are available.
However, if you’re not happy with your hosting provider, this is the right time to switch to another hosting provider. When looking into this, it’s important to not only look at their price. You should also look at their performance, uptime promises, security, and scalability options. You want to go for a hosting company that can grow with your business.
Why you might need to upgrade your current hosting plan
There are clear reasons why you should upgrade your shared hosting plan. Here are some:
- Your website performance is not as it used to be. Your website’s performance is key in the user experience. User experience is one of the key measurements for your search engine ranking. If your website needs more than two seconds to load, you will need a bigger hosting plan. To check your website’s performance you can use tools such as PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and GTmetrix.
- Security is important to you. Shared hosting plans offer the basics and are often well secured. However, as your website starts to grow you might want to consider using some of the premium security services that can be added to VPS and dedicated hosting.
- You’re running multiple websites. Shared hosting plans often allow you to host one website. If you’re running multiple websites, it might be worth it to upgrade.
- Downtime is becoming an issue. If you’re experiencing a lot of downtime with your website, it’s time to upgrade. Having a lot of downtime on your website will mean that visitors will enter your website only to see an error. These visitors might never try to visit your website again. Hostio Solutions offers a 99.9% uptime.
- The shared resources aren’t enough. As your website grows over time, chances are high that your website will need more resources than a shared hosting plan offers. This is a clear sign that it’s time to upgrade.
- You need customization options. If you have special requirements for your website and need to do more customization, you might need to switch to a more flexible hosting plan.
- You’re running an online store. If you’re running an online store VPS hosting or dedicated hosting are a better option. The reason for this is that you’re dealing with sensitive information about your customers, such as their addresses and payment details. With VPS and dedicated hosting, you’ll be able to protect this information against cybercriminals.
- Your website gets a lot of visitors at the same time. If your website gets 100 visitors per day, this is a lot easier to handle for your server than 100 visitors per minute. If your website often gets a lot of visitors at the same time, it’s time to upgrade. This can, for example, be the case when you’re doing flash sales or other promotions.
- When a caching plugin will not suffice. With relative static content, the use of a caching plugin will improve the performance of your website. Sometimes this is not sufficient anymore. Then it’s time to upgrade.
Should you upgrade to dedicated hosting or VPS hosting?
After reading all of this, you may already have decided that it’s time to upgrade. But what should you go for next: dedicated hosting or private hosting?
With dedicated hosting, you’ll rent a dedicated server that is fully reserved to serve your website. In other words, you won’t be sharing any resources with other customers, you’ll be able to ensure high performance and will have a lot of control and customization options. It’s the best choice if you need a lot of resources and have a bigger budget. Use cases/examples that require dedicated hosting are the larger e-commerce platforms, sites with a social community or many users/visitors etc.
VPS hosting lies in between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. With VPS hosting you’ll still share a physical server with other customers. However, this physical server is divided into multiple virtual servers. Each virtual server has its own resources, which means that you don’t have to share your resources with other customers. Whilst resources are limited, VPS hosting is often enough for growing websites.
Both VPS hosting and dedicated hosting are scalable, customizable, and reliable.
Managed plans
Upgrading your hosting plan might sound a bit complicated and intimidating. However, Hostio Solutions offers plenty of managed hosting plans. This means that we take care of all the technical aspects of your website, so you can focus on your business.
How to upgrade your hosting plan
It’s important to plan ahead and choose the right hosting package from the start. If your website is ready for bigger and better things, you’ve probably decided it’s time to upgrade. If you’re happy with your current hosting provider, the best thing to do is to contact them and see which options are available.
However, if you’re not happy with your hosting provider, this is the right time to switch to another hosting provider. When looking into this, it’s important to not only look at their price. You should also look at their performance, uptime promises, security, and scalability options. You want to go for a hosting company that can grow with your business.
