Is It Time to Upgrade Your Shared Hosting Plan?

Shared hosting is the most popular option for online business owners, but what are the benefits of upgrading your website hosting plan?

Imagine your website is a rented retail unit and a shared server as the shopping centre where the unit is based. In physical, practical terms, there are various advantages to sharing a retail space, but digitally speaking, it also means sharing the server’s resources, which can become stretched over time.

Most business owners choose shared website hosting plans as a cost-effective measure but investing in a dedicated hosting plan comes with numerous advantages too. If you’ve been having problems with your existing site, whether it’s downtime or slow loading or security, then it might be time to upgrade your plan.

Here are the benefits of dedicated hosting:

Faster Load Times

Did you know that most users leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load? The rate at which potential customers exit your site without buying anything is known as a bounce rate, and the higher your bounce rate, the more revenue you’re losing.

One of the major drawbacks of shared hosting plans is that all of the server’s resources are distributed evenly between the site. This can be a problem with the server is running slowly, which can affect the performance and load time of all the sites it hosts.

Site speed is an increasingly important factor because search engines use it as an SEO metric, so a slow load time can negatively impact your business. With a dedicated server, your site will always load quickly.

Improved Traffic Capacity

It’s possible to have too much of a good thing when you’re on a shared hosting plan. While your goal is to bring qualified traffic to your site that will convert into customers and generate for your business, too much traffic can crash your site.

Most shared hosting plans max out at 10,000 visitors per day. That’s not good if you have a sudden traffic surge. If your marketing is working out for you, then ideally, you don’t want have your site crash just when you’re getting a lot of interest from users.

Upgrading from shared hosting opens up a whole array of new possibilities. With a larger bandwidth and storage capacity, options such as VPS (virtual private server) hosting or cloud hosting will help you handle unexpected traffic spikes.

Avoid Downtime

As mentioned, unexpected downtime can cost your business money. While hosting providers vary, they should offer a minimum valid uptime of 99% to ensure your website doesn’t have any surprise outages, which not only deter customers but also affect your SEO ranking.

At Web, we guarantee 99.8% uptime for dedicated hosting as well as continuous customer support to help with any questions you may have about your site. If your host offers less than that, it may be time to consider an upgrade.

Enhanced Security

We all need to be careful about visiting unsecured sites online nowadays. No website is too big or too small to be exploited by vicious online attacks, and it can be difficult for shared hosting providers to offer guaranteed protection to all clients.

By contrast, VPS hosting is especially resilient against potential cyber-attacks. What’s more, this option enables you to back up your data and quickly protect or restore your website in the event of an attack. Web also provides SSL certification to show users and search engines that your site is secure.

Growth and Customisation

With shared hosting, all of the files, images, and HTML code that make up your website are stored on a server with all of the assets from other clients’ sites. By upgrading your plan, you’ll have a lot more extra space for all the images, files, and code you’ll need as your website grows and expands.

Additionally, dedicated hosting comes with more customisation options, including the ability to create multiple email accounts and domains and make quick site modifications yourself, as and when you need.

Tailoring your hosting features to your needs is the best way to take responsibility for growing and maintaining your web presence, enabling your business to expand online and reach new audiences.

Conclusion – What To Do Next?

Shared hosting is a great, cost-effective option for business owners who are starting out online, but for your web presence to grow, you’re going to need more storage space, improved performance, and airtight security.

Web offers a wide range of plans to suit our clients’ various needs, and our team will be happy to go over the various upgrade options we have available, whether your current site is with us or not. The sooner you start, the sooner you can turbo-charge your success online.