When you start your small business, you may be tempted to select the lowest-priced web hosting available for your online presence in order to keep costs low. However, as your business grows and more people start visiting your website, you will outgrow your discount hosting. Furthermore, if you sell products online or offer web-based customer service, you cannot afford to have an unstable website hosted with a cheap plan. When your beginner hosting plan fails to accommodate your growth, you should consider upgrading to virtual private server hosting.
Reasons to Switch from Shared Hosting
When you are researching economical web hosting it is hard to ignore the rock bottom prices of super cheap plans. However, these seemingly economical plans are usually for shared hosting.
With a shared hosting plan your website will reside on a computer server that may host hundreds of other websites. This means that you share the server's resources with other web hosting clients. The server's memory and disk space has to accommodate numerous websites and applications.
If one company begins to overload the server with high traffic, hogs the memory or becomes the target of a distributed denial of service attack, the other websites on the server will experience problems and possibly downtime.
In order to avoid these problems, you can upgrade your hosting to a virtual private server plan that provides you with your own section of a server with a specific amount of resources that you do not have to share with others.
Features of VPS Hosting
A VPS, also known as a virtual dedicated server, provides you with your own disk space, memory, CPU (central processing unit) allocation and preferred operating system.
When you purchase a shared hosting plan, you are stuck with whatever operating system the web host installs on the server that houses your website. With a VPS you can install whatever version of Linux or Windows you prefer because you have direct access to your web hosting space.
You can also choose what types of email applications, databases, security programs, firewalls, web server software and content management systems reside on your VPS. You can also customize these applications and install scripts that may not be allowed with shared hosting plans.
In addition, with shared hosting you may be limited to how many emails you can send per hour. With VPS hosting, your mass emails to your contact lists will not be delayed because of shared hosting limitations.
Preparing to Move to a VPS Host
Once you find a VPS host that suits your needs, you should back up all of your files from your old hosting plan. The control panel that you use to manage your shared hosting space may have a backup wizard or a migration manager to help you complete this task.
Once you backup your files, you must redirect your Internet Protocol (IP) address, the specific number that corresponds to your website's name, to your new space. Your domain name registrar can provide you with details on how to complete this task if you need help.
In addition, some VPS hosting companies will provide migration services to help you move your files from your old shared space.
Scalability and Upgrades
While purchasing pre-configured shared hosting can get you online quickly, it can limit your growth in the long run. A VPS plan will enable you to accommodate large surges in traffic on your site and install complex applications to handle database and customer service apps.
When new versions of operating systems are released, you can install them right away instead of waiting for the web host to schedule an upgrade on a shared hosting server. In addition, you can apply patches and add security features on your own.
A reputable VPS web host will also provide you with 24-hour technical support to help you in case you run into any issues managing your web site and web-based applications.
Overall, the customization features of VPS web hosting provide you with more flexibility and power than shared hosting. Furthermore, you will never have to worry about your website going offline due to the online activity of other companies sharing resources on the same machine.
Visit a site like http://www.dedimonster.com for more information.
