This web hosting service works out-of-sight, but its effect on your company cannot be unseen when it fails to match up to your site’s needs because you might experience sluggish web pages, server downtime, notices of limitations, or inability to accommodate the growing traffic.
It is the difficulty of knowing if the problem is indeed from your host or if the problem lies inside your website. The reason could be a poorly optimized WordPress website, big pictures, a problematic plugin or even database related concerns.
The following are the most obvious signs that your current web host is holding your business back and how to solve them.
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Signs That Your Current Web Host Is Holding Your Business Back
1. Your Website Is Regularly Running Slow
Having a regularly slow-running website is detrimental to the experience offered to your customers. People may get frustrated enough that they leave your website before it even loads, particularly when they are browsing from a mobile device.
Hosting can be responsible for slow loading times when there are not enough CPU or memory in your server, too few PHP workers, slow hard drive, poor settings, or inadequate resources compared to your needs.
Things you can do
- Test the performance of your website
- Optimize big images
- Delete useless plugins
- Use caching
- Check database performance
It will be useful to check the hosting resources when your website is working slow.
If your website is well optimized and the server response time is still low or the resources like CPU, memory, or PHP workers are always exhausted, it will be better to upgrade your hosting.
2. Your Hosting Cannot Cope With Your Business Expansion
Your hosting needs may vary depending on how much you are expanding your business. The site for a small company may gradually start to host an online shop, booking facility, customer accounts, bigger database, and marketing campaigns.
The hosting that was suitable for you at the time of launching may not be ideal now.
Things you can do
- Look at your current traffic, storage, database, and application needs on a regular basis.
- Pick a host package that offers a way to upgrade so that you don’t have to build your website again.
It will be too late when the site cannot handle the increased traffic because an upgrade becomes an emergency situation.
3. You’re Reaching Your Hosting Resources Limits All the Time
It is evident that such notifications mean that your website is putting too much load on the server than your hosting package can handle.
This depends on your hosting environment as the resource limits can be in terms of CPU usage, RAM/physical memory, entry processes, I/O, PHP workers, disk space, or database resources.
However, there is always a reason behind such limits, especially with shared hosting, but constantly hitting them is a reason to look into it.
Things you can do
- It is necessary to identify the exact resource that gets consumed and not just purchase additional storage.
- In case it is a CPU that gets consumed, additional processing power will be required. Otherwise, additional memory or PHP workers will be needed.
Our article regarding server resource sharing will help understand the effects of such restrictions on websites’ loads.
4. Your Website Is Not Accessible Often Enough
Occasional outages may occur, but if the outages happen often, this is definitely a problem for your business website. Customers cannot get into touch with you, order from you, book something, or find the information that they need when your website is not operational.
Websites often get crashed because of server overloads, bugs in plugins, failure to connect to databases, and security vulnerabilities.
Things you can do
- Conduct website downtime analysis to check how often your website is down, and at what time of the day/night such downtimes happen.
- Find out from the host if it is server maintenance downtime, or lack of resources, or other infrastructure issues.
If there are server-related downtimes and you keep experiencing them, change your hosting company.
5. Your Hostings Make Website Management Hard
The hostings you choose need to make website management relatively easy.
When dealing with SSL certificates, databases, files, domains, backups, or WordPress installations always turns into an IT headache for you, your hosting can be adding more work than necessary.
Things you can do
Search for helpful management tools including:
- Efficient control panel
- Easy SSL management
- Database & file management tools
- Staging servers
- Automatic backup management
- Convenient WordPress management.
Effective tools help save your time spent on the technical administration.
6. Your Website Becomes Slow During Periods of High Activity
Is it common for your website to function well at all times except when a promotional event is going on, an interesting article is published, or there’s a sudden rise in traffic on your site?
For instance, if a website can handle 50 visitors easily, but fails to cope when hundreds of visitors show up in a short span of time, then it does not only depend on the number of visitors.
It means your existing hosting is lacking the necessary resources for handling your peak loads. It is not just about the quantity of visitors. Dynamic pages, databases, form functionalities, e-commerce functionality, and more can make your server work harder.
Things you can do
- Monitor your CPU, memory, PHP worker, I/O and other resource usage when you get spikes in traffic.
- If you see that your resources are getting exhausted, make sure that you optimize the website first.
- In case you find that your server still needs to do too much work for your plans, then it is best to upgrade ahead of your next major push.
VPS hosting is another option to consider for websites which are undergoing growth.
7. Your Backup and Restoration Information Is Not Clear
It is pointless to have a backup if there is no way for restoring the website in case something happens. This means that it would be wise to investigate the backup information provided by the hosting company if it is not clear to you.
If the web hosting service does not properly explain the process of backups, the frequency of backups, how long backups are stored, and how restoration works, then you need to do some research on that matter.
Things you can do
- Make sure that you know how often backups are performed, how long backups are kept, and what they cover.
- Do not just assume that “daily backup” guarantees easy restore of all sections of your website.
It is especially true for businesses that have highly dependent web presence. An update gone wrong, security threat, accident, and even a server issue should not become a business catastrophe.
8. Your Support System Responds Late in Case of Any Technical Problem
Any technical issue becomes a business problem if it is not resolved on time.
Consider a situation when your site crashes at business hours and you reach out to your hosting provider but receive a reply after several hours which doesn’t solve your problem.
A lack of promptness in response and non-specific instructions can complicate things.
Things you can do
Before you actually have any problems that you need help with, test out your host’s customer service to know how to report a technical problem.
Look out for:
- Slow response times from support
- Technical know-how of support
- Getting specific answers
- Communication regarding server problems
- Help when your site is down
Should critical hosting issues consistently take an inordinately long time to sort out, it is advisable to use a hosting company that has responsive technical support.
9. Insufficient Security Features
Not only do you need somewhere to host your files; your website requires security.
Hosting is part of your security plan because the service provider can offer you different security measures such as SSL certificates, malware scans, firewall services, and others.
This does not imply that hosting by itself is enough to ensure safety for the website. Updates for WordPress, plugins, passwords, themes, permissions, and website settings are all equally important.
Things you can do
- See if your hosting offers things like SSL, malware detection, firewalls, security monitoring, and backups.
- In addition to that, make sure all your CMS, plugins, themes, passwords, and user permissions are secure.
Website security includes other elements besides hosting, but weak server security may make recovery hard in case of a security breach.
10. Your Business Needs More Resources Than Shared Hosting Can Offer
The problem is not that shared hosting does not meet your requirements; rather, there will be some businesses that might outgrow shared hosting because they will need additional resources.
Things you can do
- Optimize your site first and watch the resource consumption of your site.
- Should it still suffer from resource exhaustion or have slow database activity, consider upgrading your site to VPS hosting or another high-resource hosting option.
It is not about purchasing the most powerful hosting solution that money can buy. It is about having sufficient power for your load.
How to Know Whether the Hosting Is the Actual Problem
Prior to making changes and switching the web host, ensure that the problem lies within the hosting.
Some factors which may lead to slow loading websites include:
- Unoptimized images
- DNS problems
- Improperly written themes
- Limited hosting resources
- Multiple plugins
- Database issues
- Third-party service lagging
- Too much Javascript
- Caching issues
- Hosting server configurations
Perform run speed tests, look at your hosting resources utilization, view the uptime log, and analyze server response time.
If the website has poor optimization, then switching the host might be useless, but if you have good optimization and your server keeps running into limits or encountering some kind of issues, then switching the hosting becomes a more reasonable option.
When to Upgrade or Switch Web Hosting
It is important to confirm whether the problem is indeed related to the web hosting service before switching. Performance, resource utilization, uptime, security, and support need to be assessed.
The problem could be easily fixed through optimization. Alternatively, if the host has a good infrastructure and an upgrade is possible, an upgrade would suffice.
If this problem still persists despite optimizing your website and your host cannot provide you with the necessary resources, it might be time to change your web host.
Conclusion
The role of the web host is to help your business, not cause constant issues that will make your site run slowly, prevent people from accessing it, prevent growth, or waste your time. It all depends on figuring out what is causing the issue – is it the website or the host?
If your website has outgrown the capacity of your existing plan, you need to first resolve the particular issue. You will be able to upgrade only if your service provider is capable of catering to your requirements, or migrate if the underlying service can no longer do so.
Is Your Web Hosting Ready for Your Business?
In case your web hosting is limiting you, HarmonWeb provides shared, WordPress and VPS web hosting options, depending on what your website needs. Select the appropriate web hosting that fits your current capacity and allows your business to expand freely.
