There comes a time in your life when you start to outgrow things that once you thought were perfect for you. When you grew as a teenager you must have loved that white t shirt but you can barely fit in it now.
The analogy might seem irrelevant but when you put it into context, it will make a lot sense. A website in the beginning is small with less data and fewer visitors. As it grows, it can no longer survive on subpar hosting or smaller servers.
The tricky part is, it is very difficult to tell if your website needs to a better hosting service or not. Of course, in the beginning you go for cheaper hosting alternatives to cut costs. As your business and website grows, you need to identify when your website needs a bigger server or a good hosting service.
In this article, we will take a look at some of the indicators that are helpful in realizing if your website has outgrown your current hosting provider.
But before we do that, let’s build a basic understanding of different kinds of WordPress hosting. If you already have sound knowledge on this topic, you can skip right to the next part.
Understanding the different types of WordPress hosting is important because when your website is outgrowing your hosting, you would need to decide which type of WordPress hosting should you go for next.
There are four types of WordPress hosting:
- Shared WordPress Hosting
- Dedicated WordPress Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- Virtual Private Servers
Shared WordPress Hosting
Imagine yourself living in a house with four rooms. You can say that it is your house but you are only allowed to use one of the four rooms. Shared hosting is a lot like. There is one server and all the users are allotted a certain share of that server. The main selling point of a shared hosting is that it is cost effective. It offers a cheaper solution to new website owners who are looking to cut costs.
Since the resources are shared with every customer, it is not suitable for high traffic websites.
Dedicated WordPress Hosting
As the name suggests, dedicated hosting is when you have ownership of the entire server. It is ideal for users who wants full autonomy of their servers. Organizations that are looking for superior performance with the ability to handle larger amount of traffic go for dedicated hosting.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting involves a network of servers that provides instant provisioning and scalability. It allows you to add more resources into your hosting plan, like RAM, as and when you need it.
Virtual Private Servers
A VPS is a virtual machine that is provided by a hosting company. It comprises of smaller virtual server on a single cloud server.
When Should You Consider Changing Your Hosting Provider
Now that we have understood what are the types of hosting there are, we can now look at the signs that tells you when you should change your hosting provider.
Your Website is Slow. Really Slow
As mentioned earlier, businesses look to cut costs in the early stages of their life cycle so they go for shared hosting. As business grows, it starts to get more traffic on its website. This makes a shared server insufficient for that particular website.
The first sign of this is your website will start to crawl at a snail’s pace. It will slow down to the point that it will frustrate you and your visitors. Slower websites will reduce in poor revenues and conversion rate. Slow websites are also not ranked lower in the SERPs by Google.
Your Web Host Can’t Grow With Your Website
As mentioned above, there are normally 4 types of web hosting providers; shared, dedicated, VPS and Cloud. Most businesses opt for shared, dedicated and VPS hosting which might seem very cost effective and suitable at first, but most of the time they are not able to keep up with the pace of a business’s growth.
This is why it is suggested to opt for cloud hosting providers. Cloud hosting ability to scale its resources and operational capabilities along with the business makes it an attractive prospect.
Your Host Doesn’t Provide Support for The Tools You Need
Your web host is like a support system for your business. It should cater to all your business needs. As you grow, you would need new tools, softwares or even hardwares and your web host should be able to provide support for it. A new software could be a content management system. A new hardware could be a load balancer or even a new server. Whatever it is, your web host must be able to support it.
If your web host is unable to support your business through its growth, then it’s time for you to move on to a better hosting provider.
Your Website Has Become Vulnerable
As your website grows, it becomes more prone to cyber attacks. Hackers often target bigger websites because they can extract more crucial data from it. In such times, you need your web host to provide rock solid and reliable security.
If your website is facing DDos or any other kind of attacks and your web host’s security is constantly being compromised, then you definitely need a new hosting provider.
Your Hosting is Becoming Expensive
A web host that is not suited to your business needs can actually cost you more than a hosting provider that has all the resources set up for you. This means that a hosting provider that is not optimized will have to incur more costs to set up resources that you need. On the flip side, a hosting provider that is ready to serve your increasing demands will have to incur no extra costs to cater to your business.
Final Words
The importance of a good hosting provider shouldn’t be underestimated, especially for a growing business. It is not unusual for a business to outgrow its hosting provider as there are many web hosts who are short term solutions and fail to grow as the business grows. So at any point if you feel like switching to a better web host, you shouldn’t hesitate to make that decision. Talk to us if you need any help or consultation assistance of your hosting.
