When is it the right time to get more out of your hosting? As your site grows, you should expect to outgrow your hosting options and require something more. So when should you move on to dedicated hosting?

Consider your web hosting carefully.

When you are first starting out, cost will naturally be a major consideration for hosting plans, so chances are your business will start with Shared Hosting.

With Shared Hosting you get a slice of a larger server, sharing the space with maybe 100-200 sites, but it could be anywhere up to and over 1,000 other sites depending on your host. Shared hosting is okay when cost is a major factor, however as your business grows so will your site and its traffic. Sharing with so many sites can have adverse effects, for example when the other sites get busy the performance of your site will be degraded. If your sites run slowly, it doesn’t paint a good first impression to current or prospective clients.

A step above this is a VPS, or Virtual Private Server (sometimes called a Virtual Dedicated Server). Basically, this is a “server” that is all yours, however there will be maybe 10-15 of these VPS servers running on the host machine. You will be guaranteed a certain amount of resources with most VPS providers, though again if a site on your server experiences high volumes of traffic it will effect everything else. This is great if you need or want slightly more control over what the server runs but still don’t need an entire server to yourself.

As your sites grow, you may find that the share of a server isn’t enough, the next consideration is dedicated hosting. This is where you have the server to yourself and only run what you want on it. You have complete control of everything the server does and can do. If you’re not confident managing your server, plenty of providers will offer you various options for them to manage the server for you, but you will pay a premium for this service.

From the moment you launch a new site or service, it is important to be aware of your current server and how it is performing. If traffic increases it is good to be aware and act soon to make sure you don’t generate a bad image with a slow site or one that doesn’t load properly. More importantly is to make sure you get a server that suits your needs.