Just like a baby outgrows its clothes, so can your website outgrow its current hosting plan. When this happens, you have to act fast to safeguard the reputation and popularity of your site. To do this, you need to familiarize yourself with the early signs that a provider is struggling to support your growing traffic and resources.
Recognizing early that you’ve outgrown your current web host comes with numerous benefits. First, you’ll be able to notify your visitors well in advance of any planned downtime so that it doesn’t affect your site conversions. Besides, you’ll have enough time to migrate all your data and check it for integrity.
With that in mind, here are 5 signs you need a web host upgrade.
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Abnormal fluctuations in site speed
When visitor traffic begins to exceed the bandwidth allotted to you by your host, fluctuations in load speed are likely to occur. Usually, every web server has a limit as to how many access requests it can process at a go. When this limit is reached, your web resources take longer to display on user browsers. In turn, this causes your site to load slower than normal thereby discouraging visitors from staying longer on it.
According to multiple studies, any site that takes more than five seconds to display its content loses more than half of its would-be visitors who abandon it for other websites. Of course, this is something you want to avoid lest your conversion rate and revenue suffers drastically.
Incompatibility with your site tools
In the course of running your online business, you’re likely to want to add different tools including new plugins and themes to enhance performance and results. In some cases, your preferred web host can fail to support these new additions citing incompatibility. Normally, this could be an indicator that it’s time to migrate to another hosting company with better features and one that supports the tools your growing business requires.
The good thing is there’s quite a lot of hosting options today including providers that specialize on certain CMS platforms like WordPress and their specific needs. For example, Hosting Foundry recently reviewed providers that offer excellent hosting plans for WP users. You can out check their WordPress hosting comparison to understand how these companies work and how to choose the best one for your site.
Vulnerability to cyber attacks
With cases of malicious hacking on the rise, we cannot emphasize enough the need to work with a secure and well-organized web host. Indeed, this is why you really need to consider migrating to a new host if your site falls victim to cyber-attacks as it indicates that your web host’s security measures are lacking.
Malicious hackers are always hunting for vulnerabilities on websites with valuable data to steal. This puts at risk sites that accept payment cards or collect sellable data such a social media login details. Therefore, if your web host has been compromised lately and you were lucky to be safe, you might want to consider moving to other safer options.
Inflexible hosting plans
As your site grows, so does its requirements in terms of resources that help it remain reliable to the visitors. As such, you might want to move to higher plans when your current one can no longer support your needs. And if your provider doesn’t have such provisions like VPS or dedicated hosting, then this could spell doom for your site at some point in its growth curve.
A decent web host should be flexible with its hosting packages both in features and pricing. Whether you want to upgrade or downgrade, it should have a plan that aptly suits your needs. For instance, if you want more storage, speed, or security, your host should be able to offer them on demand and charge reasonable fees.
Questionable IP reputation
Your site gets its IP address from your host’s servers and this can sometimes be public. Some companies hardly monitor their customers’ activities which means they don’t get to find out when their allocated IPs have been abused. If your current host sounds like one of these, it is advisable that you migrate to another provider that cares about its reputation and those of its customers.
Using a web host with questionable IP reputation affects your rankings on search engines and can also negatively affect email deliverability to prospects. It’s even worse if the company doesn’t update its server software often as this leads to IP blacklisting. No matter how good your content is or how well you’ve optimized your website, it’s extremely difficult to perform well online when operating in such conditions.
What triggers you to migrate to a new host? We’d love to hear your feedback.
