8 Signs That You Need to Upgrade Your Hosting Service

Any business that has chosen a particular web hosting service cannot reasonably expect to perpetually stick with the same web hosting plan. A successful business will grow year after year, raking in more revenue and increasing its customer base as it does. This, more often than not, will require significantly enhanced web hosting support.

What are the Signs That You've Outgrown Your Hosting Service?

The following are 8 signs that indicate that you have outgrown your existing web hosting plan and that an upgrade is highly recommended.

Slow Website

Your customers' time is valuable. From Google to your visitors themselves, your website's performance will be judged based on response times and how quickly users can access your website.

If your website is slow and laggy, customers will simply move on to a competitor whose website has shorter wait times and is more efficient. If you are struggling with slow speeds on your website, it is often a sign to upgrade to dedicated hosting.

Increased Traffic

Becoming a popular website with thousands of new users added every week or so is sure to bring you lots of revenue and growth. However, it is also likely to result in high levels of traffic on your website that may render it slow and buggy or even unusable.

Need for Greater Bandwidth

If you are inviting more and more users to your website and offering them apps and data that they can download and interact with, this drastically increases the bandwidth usage and eats into the bandwidth that your website is allotted by your service provider.

In such a case, upgrading to a plan with increased bandwidth is a must to ensure that users get seamless access to your website and its features.

Inadequate Security

Although your web hosting service will try and give you the best protection possible for your website, sometimes, the security patches just are not enough. If you find that your website and its information are susceptible to attacks online, first maintain a website backup and then switch to a service provider with better security protocols.

READ: 7 Cybersecurity Basics and Their Importance to Your Biz

Web Hosting Services are No Longer as Cheap as They Used to be

No web hosting service will give you all the features and tools you need to grow from the get-go. Most of these features may be unlocked by paying for add-on subscriptions or plans that add up to become an expensive affair in the long run. Instead of incurring costs from adding features, it would make greater financial sense to upgrade the hosting plan as a whole.

Frequent Website Outages or Downtime

A major sign that you need to change your web hosting service provider is if they are unable to keep your website up and running 24x7. If you notice that your website is down at regular intervals, you are also probably losing lots of revenue via customers who are unable to access your website.

Amazon may lose over $3300 in just one second of downtime, and while this may not be the case for your business, the damage is certainly not negligible.

You Need More Features to Facilitate Growth

Not all web hosting services are made equal. Some offer advanced security protocols or features that will help you accelerate business growth, whereas others may completely lack such features.

Regular updates and robust security patches, the ability to change PHP versions, and so on are just a few examples of such features. If you find yourself looking for such features and your web hosting service is unable to provide them, it might be time to make a switch.

You Want to Add More Domains or Features

A hosting service may only offer one domain and a limited number of sub-domains for your website. This is restrictive, and while it makes little difference to small businesses, it does not account for growth and expansion. The bigger you get and the more features you want your customers to enjoy, you may need to switch to a service provider who gives you access to more domains and sub-domains.

Find the Right Fit

A web hosting service is essential to a business and can easily make or break the prospects of an enterprise. It is therefore important to ensure that you are on a hosting plan that is right for you and is capable of handling the number of users and requests that your website gets daily.

There is a lot more to be lost in the form of revenue and prospective customers when compared to the marginal cost of an improved hosting service.