When is the Right Time to Switch to VPS from Shared Hosting?

For most websites, shared hosting plans are the first hosting solutions because of their affordability. Since shared plans are the most cost-effective hosting plans, small businesses and start-ups find them most suitable for launching their online ventures. Shared hosting plans are also comparatively easier to install and deploy.

The choice of VPS or shared hosting will depend upon a number of things. Before we start discussing which one should be your hosting solution we take a look at a number of things that will help you shape your decision –

Why are shared hosting plans popular?

Shared hosting plans will benefit businesses by offering them resources like bandwidth, disk space, memory and processing power. At the same time, there are some obvious limitations which arise because of the very nature of these hosting plans. As they are shared with co-users, there are instances when neighboring sites may use up too many resources and slow down your site. These are times when you may feel the need to upgrade your web hosting plans to a VPS hosting model.

How to migrate from shared hosting to VPS?

You can easily migrate from shared hosting to VPS by conveying the same to your hosing provider. Your host will draft a migration plan and depending upon when your website has the least amount of traffic, carefully begin moving files to a VPS server. You can choose to move in real time or when your website is inactive.

What are some signs that your site needs to upgrade to VPS hosting from shared hosting?

The truth is that hosting plans are very crucial for determining success of any online business, whether you are running a blogging site or an ecommerce store. Regardless of how many promotions have been successfully created or how unique the content is, unless the hosting plan can handle the traffic and workloads, all efforts are wasted. So, it is very important to invest in a good web hosting plan.

– When you find that your existing shared hosting plans are working well and you have no issues in managing the traffic your site gets, there is no need to go for an upgrade. You can continue to use it for some more time easily, because every upgrade means spending more money on hosting. However, when you find that the traffic has increased at a rate of 30% daily and you are getting as many 5000 page views every day, you should consider a change to VPS hosting. VPS hosting is a must-have solution when the traffic crosses 8000 page visits daily.

– When you find that it is important for the blog to generate revenues, you should consider a switch to VPS. Regardless of how much traffic the blog is getting, you need it to generate money. What is important to realize is that even if the blogging site is down for only a few seconds, it can have a very negative impact on your business.

– Another indication that your shared hosting plans may require an upgrade is when you realize that the site is getting sluggish. It typically slows down with many plug-ins creating numerous SQL database and PHP requests.

– Overloading may cause your website to go down from time to time; this is bound to affect your business. So, it may be taken as a signal that your shared hosting plans need to be upgraded to VPS.

– When you find that comments are getting loaded exceptionally slowly and it is also becoming hard to post new ones or 404 errors are becoming frequent, it is time to switch to VPS. You may also find that deleting comments, publishing and saving posts are returning Internal Server Error 500.

– Another obvious reason to change your plans is when you find that your web hosting provider is sending you notifications that you have used up all your resources for that month.

– When you load very heavy multi-media content like video files which must be downloaded your site will need greater processing power and bandwidth than your shared web host can offer.

– You may also need a server with root access; this is possible only with VPS hosting plans which will grant you full root access and allow you to install your own operating system and custom applications. This high-end flexibility or customizability which VPS plans offer can never be obtained through shared hosting.

– If you realize that your website is getting frequent security threats it means it requires additional and improved security. This is when it is better to switch to VPS hosting. Shared hosting is less secure as there are multiple sites sharing the same server and any malicious script running in one can affect the others.

– Finally, when you require additional technical supports, you should make a switch to VPS. VPS hosting is capable of providing better supports for all kinds of technical issues, and depending on the type of package you pay for you can get supports for website migrations, live tech supports, server optimization, installation of servers and enhanced security.

Time for VPS

You know it is time for VPS when your website has outgrown shared hosing but not enough to lease a dedicated server.

So, with VPS hosting, you will get more flexibility as far as installing custom software is concerned. You can have root access to servers; this lets you change its configurations too to serve your interests. You will be provided with a definite amount of resources for your business needs and you can easily provision for more resources when the need arises. Since you have dedicated resources for the site you can enjoy better performance too. You have full freedom to set up custom applications, and manage multiple sites and high traffic without downtimes.