As your business grows and your website has a bigger job to do, at some point you need to switch and scale to a web hosting plan that matches your growing needs. There are a bunch of other hosting plans out there to help you size up. Many provide additional features to keep your growing site performing smoothly. It’s much like moving homes as your family grows.
So let’s get started. First, I’ll explain why you might want to upgrade then we’ll walk through some of the most common types of hosting plans before showing you what to consider when choosing your hosting plan for to upgrade process. Let’s start with the heavy lifting.
Why You Might Need to Upgrade and The 3 Stages of Web Hosting
Web hosting is a service that allows individuals and businesses to host their websites on the internet. It can be seen as a form of web storage. Remember how poor optimization can affect your site’s performance. In order to determine if you actually need a larger and more powerful plan, you first need to evaluate the pain points your web hosting account is experiencing. Perhaps your site is running slower than normal, loading slowly, or not loading at all? Have you been experiencing an increase in traffic? Or perhaps your website is dynamic and heavy, or running numerous scripts? There are many factors that can contribute to any of these symptoms, so we recommend trying a few things to improve your site’s performance. If you’ve already worked on optimizing your website’s performance, but you’re still not seeing an improvement, then it’s definitely time to think about an upgrade. If your website has exceeded the capacity of your current plan, you might need to upgrade it to one of these higher stages in order to maintain its performance.
There are three stages of web hosting that you might need to upgrade if your website outgrows its current hosting plan.
The 3 Stages
The first stage is shared web hosting. The cheapest of all hosting and chances are you signed up for a shared hosting plan when you originally built your site. The most convenient, low-cost, and beginner-friendly option. It involves renting space on a server, which is shared between lots of other users. This hosting is a great way to get started and requires little maintenance (as long as you choose a reputable provider like RunHost).
For some sites, shared hosting is, ultimately, the best option. If your site is small, doesn’t see a ton of traffic, and doesn’t require a lot of resources, you may never need to upgrade your plan. Websites fitting this definition often include online portfolios and personal blogs. As the name suggests, you and other shared hosting customers share the resources of the server. This means that if another website on the same server is receiving a large amount of traffic and using a lot of CPU resources, it’s possible that your site may run slower as a result.
The second stage is VPS (virtual private server) hosting. With a VPS plan, you get access to a virtually-partitioned server. This means your site will be located on the same physical server as other users’ sites but is kept separate in an allocated space that is dedicated just to you. VPS hosting comes with some super-sized benefits. You get your own set of resources that no one else can use and are able to customize your setup to meet your site’s unique needs. VPS hosting provides you with more resources than shared hosting and with more reliable performance. It’s also very scalable, meaning that as your site grows, you can simply upgrade the size of your virtual server to match the resources and RAM you need.
The third stage is dedicated servers. This is where you rent an entire physical server from your hosting provider. This server is only used to run your website and isn’t shared with any other users. This gives you access to a lot more resources than you’ll see with shared hosting. Since nobody else’s website can pull resources away from your site, it’s easy to ensure high performance and consistent uptime with dedicated hosting. Plus, you get full control over your server and can customize it to suit your exact needs. Security is also enhanced, as no other users can access your server.
Of course, all of these benefits come at an increased cost. Dedicated hosting is usually quite a bit more expensive than shared hosting. And most of the time, it lends itself to more advanced users, who know enough about hosting and optimization to personalize their own servers. However, at RunHost we offer managed dedicated hosting, meaning you can focus on running your big-time website while we handle the technical to-do list. Visit our website for more information about our hosting plan: www.runhost.com
Conclusion:
As to what we discussed here, you will not be confused about what plans to choose as your site grow bigger. Just remember, there is no one service that fits all the needs. Before making decisions always remember what Luke 14:28 says: “For example, who of you wanting to build a tower does not first sit down and calculate the expense to see if he has enough to complete it?”
