Web hosting is not a service small business owners consider or think about very often, unless something goes wrong. It’s a service that runs along in the background and keeps your website live and working well for your customers or clients.
Most of us start on shared web hosting, which is ideal for small businesses who have a few web pages, and receive small amounts of traffic and product transactions. But if your business has seen a boom in the last year with the rise in online shopping, you might be wondering if it’s time to upgrade the technology that helps your website manage all the extra traffic, data and checkouts.
Dedicated server hosting is the solution that most businesses opt for when they need to scale up. It gives your website its own dedicated server, which means no sharing of resources with other website owners. You get more storage, more bandwidth and more robust security, for your website alone. Ultimately, you get a better performing website that can store more content, manage more product pages, more website traffic, and a higher volume of transactions.
If your website has hit a few recurring snags recently, or you want to consider upgrading before the snags begin, we’ve got five clear signs that your website is in need of an improved web hosting solution.
1. Your website traffic has grown substantially
Have you noticed a steady but significant increase in traffic? A lot of extra traffic to a website on a shared hosting solution can cause some performance issues, and slow processes down. Ultimately this will frustrate your end users that will most often than not jump ship to a competitor.
If your customers have mentioned that transacting on your website has slowed down, or you want to anticipate that and catch it before it happens, it’s time to consider dedicated server hosting. In fact, even if someone else’s website on your shared hosting package is experiencing a peak in traffic, your website can be slowed down.
2. Your storage is space is running low
Are you planning on adding more pages to your website, a blog or newsroom filled with lots of content, or an e-commerce feature to start selling online? While a shared hosting is usually all one needs for a basic business website, the more data you need to store online, the more space your hosting solution needs to provide.
If you’ve started getting low storage space notifications from your hosting provider, or you want to prevent that from happening in the first place, it’s time to consider levelling up. A dedicated server is going to offer you more storage space so that you can write as much content, add as many pages and process as much customer data as you need for your business website to run as smoothly as possible.
3. Your website often crashes or experiences downtime
Has your website started to experience frequent crashes, where nothing is live or available to users for some time? If you’re on a shared hosting solution, the reality is that the combination of your neighbour’s busy websites and yours can lead to downtime more often than you’d like.
If you see that your moments of crashing and offline time are becoming too frequent for your liking, your website needs a more robust solution that can manage increased data and traffic.
4. You’re adding more websites to your online presence
Has your business grown to other parts of Africa, or perhaps Europe or the Americas? While it’s exciting to think of the expansion and creating additional websites specific to those regions, a shared hosting solution isn’t necessarily going to be able to host or manage multiple websites.
Additional websites will only spread your already limited resources even thinner and put strain on your bandwidth and storage space. A dedicated server solution will allow you to create multiple websites without negatively impacting your performance.
5. Your current hosting plan restricts what you can do
In general, if your website has started to scale up in terms of content and transactions and traffic, you will find that shared hosting is going to start to limit you. As it works to ensure all the websites on the server get the same amount of bandwidth, any content that requires a more robust speed is going to hamper your website’s performance.
Perhaps your website shows a lot of video content, your users aren’t going to get the best experience if they’re subject to buffering or inconsistent feeds. If you know that your website will require top notch speeds, a dedicated server is your solution.
So if you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for an upgrade in web hosting, your provider will be able to offer you the right dedicated server package. Whether you need more storage space, higher speeds or just more control over your service than before, a dedicated server is going to be the level up your online business needs.
