Identifying Signs that Prompt a Switch from Shared Hosting to VPS Hosting

Jul 27,2021 by Manoj Yadav

Website hosting is governed by need to take right decision at right time in terms of different factors that can have long term impact on performance of website. Website administrators and owners need to find the hosting provider and choose an appropriate hosting plan that can provide optimum support to the proposed web venture.

Understanding options

In order to know the right web hosting solution for a given website, one should understand the various options for website hosting offered by reputed hosts. There are three major types of hosting to choose from.

Shared hosting –

As the name implies, shared hosting is designed to be a multi tenant offering and can accommodate hundreds of websites on a single server. All tenant websites are supposed to share resources such as networking, compute power, and disk space. Since all resources and expenses related to maintenance of the server are shared among several users, it is the most economical choice of hosting. It can efficiently support small websites with nominal amount of traffic and relatively lesser security concerns. Shared hosting is the most popular choice of new websites which have limited resource requirements.

Dedicated server hosting

– If you look forward to a dedicated access to all resources of a standalone server, then a dedicated server is the way to go. You are allowed root access to the web server that is not going to accommodate any other user. Dedicated server hosting allows implementation of individual security protocols and is therefore preferred by websites of large organizations with greater security concerns.

VPS hosting

Virtual Private Server hosting is the intermediate hosting solution between shared and dedicated server hosting. It is created by partitioning of a single server into multiple virtual servers that can individually operate as mini dedicated servers with independent existence. Similar to shared hosting, VPS hosting can also prove to be an ideal choice for small or new websites. In fact there is growing trend of selecting VPS hosting by owners of new websites. VPS hosting is ideal for users that are not able to afford a dedicated server, yet need to access server level controls.

Upgrading to VPS hosting

As mentioned earlier, majority of websites are initially hosted in shared hosting environment. The obvious reasons for this are affordability and need for limited resources. Shared hosting cannot continue to support growing websites after certain limits. If the website continues to require additional resources for handling large traffic or to support special applications, then administrators must think of upgrading the sites to the next level of hosting.

VPS hosting is a highly cost effective option that allows ease of handling higher traffic and provides freedom to install custom applications and individual security measures. Users can also customize server configurations to match their hosting needs in addition to choose an operating system including Windows or Linux.

If your website is currently hosted in a shared hosting environment, then you need to watch out for certain symptoms that underline need to shift to VPS hosting.

Slow loading websites

If you are confident about bandwidth, uptime, and other hosting parameters, then the only factor that is causing your website to load slowly could be limited resource allocation in shared hosting environment. Reduced website performance due to higher traffic in shared hosting is the indication that your website has matured enough to be shifted to a larger hosting solution than shared hosting.

Improved server access

If you need to exercise direct root access to server for executing advanced tasks including custom server configuration, software installs, or editing of files, to name a few. The only available choices that enable server root access are dedicated and VPS hosting.

Greater security requirements

If a website is catering to business operations such as online stores, and ecommerce activities, then it is imperative to provide a secured environment for conducting financial transactions or maintaining user credentials. In shared hosting it is not possible to implement individual security arrangements in order to ensure protection from hackers. The most suitable option for enabling stricter security norms is that of switching to VPS hosting. Virtual Private Server enables several layers of security for protection of server and is not impacted by any type of activities in neighboring accounts.

Frequent downtime events

Downtime is the biggest hurdle for performance of ecommerce websites. You can incur a huge loss of revenue, if a downtime occurs even for few minutes during peak business hours. Since webhosts try to cram as many websites as possible in shared hosting, the servers become prone to be overloaded and can eventually crash due to this. Increased frequency of downtime needs immediate action of switching to a VPS hosting that allows uninterrupted availability of business website.

In conclusion

Choice of the right hosting solution such as VPS hosting is a vital factor to support your business website. It offers independence, flexibility, and reliability of hosting for guaranteed website performance.

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