5 Sure-Fire Signs You Should Upgrade Your Servers
Every small business has the capacity to experience astronomical growth. However, before you jump into the dedicated hosting wagon, it is important you understand that doing so must be justified. The truth is if your business does not “need” a dedicated server, you shouldn’t get one.
However, as your business expands, you want to be able to scale up from a shared hosting to a dedicated server that is able to handle the enhanced capacity of your business. The following signs are a pointer that you should consider upgrading to a dedicated server.
1. Your Website Has Slowed Down
When your website slows down, you will notice, and your visitors will be irritated. This is a pointer to the fact that your current hosting server is overstretched and can no longer handle simple tasks with ease. Website visitors are an impatient lot that is spoilt for choice. If your server snoozes, even for a second, a potentially lucrative customer clicks on to your competition.
Switching from a shared to a dedicated server can give your website the extra boost it needs to load lightning fast and keep visitors stuck on your website. Besides giving your business a unique IP address, a dedicated server also comes with more bandwidth and extra storage space to ensure fast processing of data and information.
2. The Need to Host Multiple Websites
Hosting many websites on a shared server means that they are all sharing the same hosting account. It also means that they are competing for the same resources. This strain on limited space, bandwidth and resources could end up grinding all your websites to a halt. This is, however, a worst-case scenario. In some cases, your websites may still be up and running, but at excruciating sluggish speeds.
To avoid these undesirable scenarios, you should scale up to a dedicated server for efficient management and allocation of resources across your applications.
3. Visitor Spikes
Your dream is for your website to start receiving hordes of traffic. Every business dreams of a day when website visitors will start trooping in massive numbers. However, the blessing of tons of visitors can turn out to be a curse if you are not adequately prepared. It is important to have a hosting service that provides options for scaling up immediately your current hosting package becomes overstretched.
The more visitors your website receives, the more your shared hosting resources are stretched. It will most likely mean paying a little more to scale up, but the expanded business will more than justify the extra expense.
4. Security Concerns
If you are concerned that a shared hosting could be compromising the security of your websites and online databases, you should seriously consider upgrading to a dedicated server. The security of a shared hosting environment can be easily compromised. Rather than risk the security of your precious data, upgrade to a dedicated server, which has superior security features.
Having a dedicated server means you are the sole user, which bolsters the security of your content. It is also easier to troubleshoot issues in a dedicated server environment since you can easily isolate and correct problems.
5. You Have Started Using Resource-Intensive Applications
As your website grows, you may want to engage more interactively with your web visitors. This could require you to install applications that gobble up resources with amazing frequency. For instance, you may have started to host downloads on your website and to stream videos and podcasts. If you do not scale up to a dedicated server, soon your website will grind to a halt, or become excruciatingly sluggish. A dedicated server can easily absorb the extra strain while at the same time maintaining, or even improving, functionality.
While having an interactive website that features rich data and applications that keep visitors locked is the dream of most businesses, with growth also comes the need to scale up your shared hosting into a dedicated server with the capacity to accommodate growth.