How to Know That You Have OutGrown Your Web Hosting?

Web hosting has become one of the commodities today. Simply select the amount of storage space and bandwidth, and get your website live and available for your audience. Prior to few years, there were several restrictions on the users but now you have a lot of choices and also the hosting costs have become negligible for several businesses.

But don’t treat web hosting as a commodity like electricity or gas. This would be a big mistake. In simple words, web hosting comprises of several moving parts, and it is important that all of them work parallel to deliver a high quality, continuous service. If you select a host that offers cheap plans it might seem to be a rational choice but in fact it could be a false economy because of the harm that it can cause your business.

Let’s take a look at five factors you should consider for understanding if your web cPanel hosting is helping your business or holding it back.

The Website Load Time

Basically, load speed is the speed at which your website gets loaded. You can measure your page speed via several websites. Load speed is essential for several reasons. The prime reason is that a faster loading website offers an improved user experience as compared to a slower loading website. It simple means that people hate waiting for long when a page takes time to load.

But this isn’t true only for desktop users. Visitors have started browsing websites on mobile too and their number is high as compared to desktop and laptop visitors. The mobile users just demand one thing and that is fast websites.

Google is well aware of this, and that’s why it has specifically defined that site speed is one of the factors that will contribute to its overall search algorithm. You won’t be told by them about the amount of load time that will affect your website’s ranking, but it doesn’t often clarify its algorithm so when it does it is better to act accordingly.

There are several factors involved in a website’s loading speed and several are related to the design. These tweaks can be done only by an experienced and highly professional magento developer to your website’s code.

The conclusion is that to improve your website’s speed can be expensive and also requires time. But the results can depend on the type of web hosting you select. If you opt for Solid State Drive (SSD) hosting or switching to a Virtual Private Server (VPS hosting), these can help you to enhance your loading speed at a small cost as compared to changing your website’s code.

The Effect of Noisy Neighbours

Do you like noisy neighbours? Of course no one does. They actually tend to lower the quality of neighbourhood.

Similar is the case in web hosting. In case your web host offers the maximum amount of disk space and bandwidth to meet your website needs just at a few bucks a month then you isn’t the only one on the server.

This is the actual problem. Your host won’t let you know about this but there will be users that will be utilizing the maximum amount of resources. Those will be the ones that will try to get more benefits from just a $2 per month hosting. It may be that they are using the server to send emails to their clients or run several scripts needing high memory for their affiliate sites.

May they use it for anything, one thing is for sure. Just a small group of noisy neighbours will pull the server’s key resources and have a harmful impact on the server’s performance.

No doubt tools like CloudLinux will act as a limiter on the power that individual clients can access, but it is required to know that your host has these types of solutions in place.

The IP Reputation

In case the server on which your website is hosted caught sending spam or hosting malware then the IP addresses might get blacklisted. This is a bad news for you as it can have a negative impact on several factors such as email deliverability, search ranking, and so on.

Several software can be used to monitor the IP reputation of your server to check if it is blacklisted. 

The key reason for getting blacklisted is that other users on the server might be running insecure applications or out-dated software. There isn’t any malicious intent from their side. But it is simply done mistakenly or without understanding.

For instance, hackers won’t display their methods or tricks but they are simple checking for insecurities or loopholes that can be exploited. You can take an example of an out-dated contact form that can be used to send spam.

Even out-dated content management systems (CMS), like WordPress or Joomla can be exploited. Such crimes have now become common these days, and the problem is that after the website design is completed, the naïve business owner doesn’t even know that he needs to keep the software up-to-date. The updates are released for a significant reason of removing any security issues.

The host can proactively address these issues by constant monitoring of the software on the server and also monitoring outgoing emails with a tool like SpamExperts. It also helps in monitoring phishing, known fingerprints of spam and malware related emails.

Again, the problem is that you need to buy these tools and some hosts might offer those at the extra cost involved in securing their IP reputation. Besides, good hosts will use them to get overcome the problems to ensure that their clients don’t get affected due to blacklisting.

Conclusion

The above mentioned simple three factors will help you to know that you have outgrown your web hosting and it is time to upgrade your plan. Outgrowing resources often happens with shared hosting and so, you can easily upgrade to VPS in such a case. So, just check if your website is performing well and if it isn’t upgrade your hosting plan.