1. Introduction
Choosing a hosting plan worries many of us. What if we decide to buy a small plan, but we require a much bigger one months later? Is there anything we can do in this situation?
All website owners know that a small hosting plan won’t work with a large number of users. It makes the site slow, and users become frustrated. In the end, your potential buyers would rather use your competitor’s sites to buy products, even though you are better at pricing, quality, and additional services.
However, website experience overrides everything; that’s why a hosting plan is a crucial question. In this article, we will write about the wide variety of hosting plans and the potential upgrades you can do as your business grows.
2. Understanding Hosting Plans and Scalability
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In this part of the article, we will discover the different hosting plan options, and their scalability.
a. The differences between Shared, VPS, Cloud, and Dedicated Hosting
Shared Hosting:
This hosting solution lets you share a web server with multiple other websites. You will share the costs, but the resources as well. It works fine if all the connected websites have a balanced number of users. There is no astonishing increase, just a predictable number every single month.
It can be good for b2b businesses, with limited searches and page views, but with valuable shopping cart value. However, the risk is still with you every time. If one of your shared-hosting partners’ traffic peaks, it will drastically influence your hosting power, as well.
There is one more crucial disadvantage of shared hosting. If your business grows, you can’t increase your power without negative consequences. If there are 4 businesses that are in the same shared-hosting subscription, all using 25% of the 100% available power, you can’t just go up to 40%. That requires that the others decrease their required power, which is never gonna happen.
Our recommendation is that if you expect online growth, stay away from shared hosting options. It seems cheap at first, but the continuous change of plans makes this decision quite expensive.
VPS Hosting:
VPS is a virtualized environment on a shared physical server. We don’t want to bore you with technical jargon, so it should be enough that a Virtual Private Server hosting (VPS) divides a physical server into virtual environments, each with dedicated resources.
So, you still share a physical server with others, which can influence your website performance, but not drastically. That’s because you have your own dedicated power that nobody can take away from you.
If other websites, running from the same physical server, require more power, they won’t steal power opportunities from you; they will only grow to their maximum virtual capacity. However, that is also the downside of the VPS hosting. You need to decide on a maximum capacity at first, and if your traffic increases in the meantime, it is hard to make changes.
Cloud Hosting:
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In this case, instead of using some form of a physical server, you would rather use a cloud provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure to host your web server.
Cloud hosting is one of the most flexible options. Think about it: you are not restricted to a physical server’s capacity, and these big service providers can always add more power to your web server without any limitations. However, they calculate their extra flexibility into their price, and the costs can increase quickly if not carefully managed.
But if your website has the potential to grow big from one day to the next, this is the safest method to avoid panic.
Dedicated hosting:
Dedicated hosting is a hosting option in which a physical server (or servers) is dedicated to a single business customer. It is the most robust solution, but also the most expensive one amongst all.
The problem with dedicated hosting for a quickly growing website is the lack of adaptability. Think about it, you don’t want to pay extra money for a service that might be good for you in the future, but too much in the present.
b. When does an upgrade become necessary?
There are two main causes when an upgrade becomes necessary.
- Present and past issues – Statistics show that if your site requires more than 4 seconds to load, you’re gonna lose 25% of all your potential buyers. You can’t let that happen. If your site has constant slow load times, frequent downtimes, you are urged to change plans, or a hosting provider. However, it is important to note that your website’s slowness can be caused by other mistakes or malfunctions. For example, adding too many plugins to your site, or high-resolution pictures, videos, or other potential threats. Do not always seek the mistake on the provider’s side!
- Potential future issues – It is better to be prepared than to be scared. Sometimes, your previous data can pinpoint future events, where your current plan will fail to satisfy your needs. A new marketing campaign, a viral post, or an increased marketing budget. These can all drive more traffic to your site, more than your current plan can handle. In this situation, it is better to act beforehand and create a smooth transition.
3. Choosing the Right Hosting Upgrade
In this part of the article, we will give you some suggestions on which types of hosting will exceed your expectations, for your dedicated use.
a. For Local Business Owners
When you are totally aware of your maximum potential traffic, and it possibly can’t go any higher than that (you can’t deliver your products outside of a specific area, or have a physical shop where you want to attract customers), shared hosting options will most likely be enough for your needs. However, be aware of what you need, and don’t go any lower just to save some money.
b. A Growing Small Business
In the case of a small but growing business, your goal is to constantly drive moderate traffic and demonstrate high security defense. In this case, most of your potential buyers are first-time visitors, and they are still insecure about your goals and intentions. A virtual private server can handle all these criteria at once. On top of that, VPS plans are not among the most expensive offers, so you can also allocate your money to other – more significant – areas.
c. For Startups
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If you have a startup, you want to scale your website as soon as possible, but you also have a limited budget. For this combination, the best option is to choose cloud hosting. In this case, scaling is feasible, and there are no time boundaries. On the other hand, it can be expensive, so you’d better not want everything all at once.
d. For a promising E-commerce store
Your needs are very similar to what most of the startups need: high traffic with no limitations. If you have the resources, even dedicated hosting options can be justifiable, but you can’t go wrong with the robust cloud hosting plans.
4. Conclusion
In this article, we introduced the most popular hosting plans for you, and also gave you some advice on what you should use in different scenarios and conditions. Don’t forget: a wrongly-selected hosting plan can influence your performance negatively, and may do more harm than you ever imagined!