Shared hosting can be great for blogs, personal websites or small to midsized companies. It will suit you well if your website is small and does not require a lot of resources. It’s pretty cheap and you do not need to have a lot of technical knowledge, as everything maintenance related is handled for you. But if you own a rapidly expanding business and your website happens to grow, and attract more and more traffic, you will find yourself lacking performance, and will inevitably need to upgrade, and choose a different type of hosting services, virtual host or a dedicated server.
How Much Is Your Website Going to Grow?
Now it would be ideal to know how much your website is going to grow even further. Does your company expect a substantial increase in traffic over a short period of time? Keep in mind that even if it is so, it may not be necessary to consider dedicated hosting, as most dedicated servers are chosen by extremely large, internationally recognized companies. Depending on your future website growth expectations, you will eventually need to make a choice between a virtual host or a dedicated server.
Do You Need High Security?
Another reason to upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting might be a need for better security for your website. You may need to keep the data of your customers safe or to protect your own information. Both, VPS and a dedicated server are much safer than shared hosting, so if you find yourself with security concerns, keep that in mind.
How Tech-Savvy Are You?
It is most likely that when you used to have shared hosting, most of the usual maintenance work has been done for you and you did not need to worry about anything hardware related. That is going to change when you choose a virtual host or a dedicated server though. A dedicated server will require much more technical knowledge to properly manage and you might need to hire additional employees to do that.
VPS may be a little less complicated because some VPS hosting providers offer the fully managed VPS services. When you purchase this type of service all the all the maintenance related work and all the updating that is needed is performed by experienced specialists, so you are not required to have any additional knowledge.
Pricing
Beyond the expected website growth, resource requirements, and maintenance work, another important aspect to consider is the pricing differences between VPS and a dedicated server. How much can you allow yourself to spend on hosting services, will you have staff that is able to handle the required ongoing maintenance of the server? As prices of a virtual host and dedicated hosting can differ quite a lot, it is important to make the right choices, so you won’t end up overpaying for the resources that remain unused.
Choose Wisely
Upgrading your hosting plan from shared hosting to either a virtual host or a dedicated server should be done smartly and only after carefully considering your options. Consider all the variables and always try to think a few years forward. Your hosting choices can end up being long-term and heavily influence the way you conduct your business.
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