The digital landscape is rapidly expanding in these days. This is signified by the proliferation of varied online platforms and an exponential increase in their traffic. Due to these evolving dynamics, websites require hosting plans which allow them to conduct their operations with speed, flexibility, and adequate security. For most startups, shared hosting plans are ideal as they are low-cost and beginner-friendly. However, shared hosting platforms typically offer limited resources as the server is shared among multiple websites.

The lack of dedicated resources causes your site to slow down during heavy traffic, and thereby compromise the potential of your business. Now, as a business, you would never want a technical glitch to hamper the chances of your success. Furthermore, shared hosting servers do not allow you to customize the server environment to suit the requirements of your websites nor do they conform to the security needs of expanding businesses.

In order to deal with these issues, businesses prefer to shift to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting platforms. VPS or Dedicated Servers hosting provides you with more resources than shared hosting platforms. Due to the availability of dedicated resources, these ensure that your website displays optimal performance at all times. Moreover, VPS plans provide for considerable scalability. As your web hosting plan should complement the needs of your growing business, here’s a list of seven signs which suggest that you need to upgrade your hosting plan:

Signs of Obsolete Hosting Plans

Insufficient Security Features: Restrictions on the customization in the Shared Hosting environment brings us to our next crucial point which is Security. Just as all the resources of the server are shared among the customers on Shared hosting, all the access restrictions defined on networks, IPs, etc. apply globally to all websites. While these settings are done to benefit and in the interest of all the users that co-exist, at times, they could be conflicting with your business’ online operations.

Moreover, certain Enterprises need to abide by strict company policies and encouraged to work in an isolated setting. The VPS and Dedicated Servers offer exactly this security isolation. You are free to configure your own Backup, Firewall, Anti-virus, Malware policies with Monitoring and Alert systems. The VPS and Dedicated Servers providers also offer DDoS protection; although some provide it at an additional cost.

Slow Speed During Peak Hours: Businesses often plan promotional business activities during weekends, festive season and other such occasions. A slow website during these periods can severely jeopardize all your plans. Even on normal days, people expect any website they visit to load in a few seconds. Shared hosting servers often cause speed hassles as they distribute RAM and CPU resources across all websites that are hosted on them. On the contrary, VPS or Dedicated servers give you dedicated RAM and processor power and provide you with greater bandwidth.

Moreover, with VPS, you are able to customize these resources in accordance with the needs of your website. Hence, VPS or dedicated server is the panacea for all speed related issues of your website.

Need for Customization: Shared hosting providers have a standard hosting environment configured on their servers. All websites need to adjust to this environment and you cannot make any customization, regardless of how important it is for your website’s operation. Such customizations are out of the scope of any Shared hosting product due to the nature of the product, where multiple customers’ websites are hosted on the same the server.

If you ever into a similar situation, you know it is time for you to jump to a more controlled environment. The VPS and Dedicated Servers give you root/administrator level access. With this, one can tweak the server operating system, application stacks to suit the requirements of the website or application.

An Upswing in Traffic: Isn’t this every website owner’s dream? An increase in traffic is definitely good news, but it is important to be prepared for that spike. Shared hosting is suitable for websites expecting low traffic which is anywhere below 10000 visits per day. However, if you are in the borderline with a graph going upwards, it is wise to upgrade your plan to VPS hosting or dedicated hosting.

Upgrading Your Hosting Plan

Although this flexibility may seem intimidating for the novice users, due to the level of control and customizations that now rests with the customer itself, there are GUI-based hosting panels that make these jobs really simple. Hosting panels give you an easy interface to manage the Web, Email, DNS and even Security aspect of your VPS/Dedicated Server. The significance of a robust hosting plan to support your website and your business is inevitable.

Your website is the center of all your marketing initiatives. To make sure it runs smoothly, your hosting plan needs to carefully chosen and upgraded. If you encounter any of these signs hampering your digital presence, it is high time to upgrade your hosting plan.