When To Upgrade Your Hosting Solution

Since shared hosting is often the best cheap hosting available, many websites start using this service. Shared hosting is basically many website sharing the same hardware, which means should any traffic spikes for one website get extremely high, every website hosted on that box will be affected. Most shared hosting companies have a penalty should you be the problem website, so you want to avoid this as much as possible by looking for any signs that you should switch to a dedicated hosting solution. Here are the top six signs to look for when deciding whether or not your site needs to make the switch.

1. Your site becomes very resource intensive.

This is the number one indicator that you need to make the switch. Any shared hosting provider worth their salt will monitor the usage of each of their clients on a shared hosting box. For clients that are using much more than the host considers fair use, notifications will be sent out. If you receive several of these notifications within a month’s time, it’s time to consider upgrading.

2. Your site is growing rapidly.

One of the best indicators of needing to upgrade to a dedicated plan is the growth of your website. If you begin consuming lots of bandwidth, or your community is rather large, then consider upgrading to a dedicated plan to avoid any outages.

3. Your application requires server customization.

If your website or database structure is such that it needs specifics to run, then shared hosting likely isn’t an option you’ll be able to take.

4. Revenue gained from the site can support the cost of a dedicated server.

It’s no secret that the cost of maintaining a dedicated server is expensive. That’s the reason many people choose shared hosting to begin their sites. When ad revenue or donations taken on your site reach more than the monthly cost of maintaining a dedicated server, consider upgrading.

5. Page load times become bogged down.

Remember that your site is your interface with the world, so you want it to run as smoothly as possible. If your daily page views are such that the server you’re running on cannot handle the load, then consider upgrading.

6. Your website relies heavily on multimedia content like audio, video, and pictures.

All three of those forms of data are bandwidth intensive to download, so you can quickly blow through your limit with a shared host if you’re not careful. If you need more bandwidth, consider upgrading to a VPS hosting or dedicated hosting solution.

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