Insight
Five signs your website has outgrown its hosting
Cheap hosting is fine for a new site with a handful of visitors. But the plan that made sense when you launched can quietly become the thing holding the business back. Here are five signs your website has outgrown where it lives, and what better hosting actually changes.
2 min read
1. It is slow, and getting slower
Pages that take several seconds to load lose visitors, especially on phones. On budget shared hosting, your site shares a server with many others, and when they get busy, so does yours. If the site is slow and nobody can tell you why, the hosting is the first suspect.
2. Nobody is updating anything
The software your site runs on, and everything added to it, needs regular updates. Most hosting plans do not do this for you: they keep the server running and leave the site to you. If you log in and see a wall of update notices, nobody is looking after it. Out-of-date software is one of the most common ways into a website.
3. You do not know when it was last backed up
Many hosts take backups, but often on the same server as the site, and restoring one means a support ticket and a wait. If the site broke this afternoon, how old would the backup be, where is it kept, and who would put it back? If you do not know, you do not have a backup plan. A shop is the extreme case: restore a week-old backup and you lose a week of orders.
4. You hear about problems from customers
If the first you know about the site being down is a customer ringing to tell you, nobody is watching it. Good hosting monitors uptime and speed around the clock, so someone usually knows something is wrong before you do.
5. Every change is a job for someone else
Hosting support will restart a server, but it will not fix a broken contact form or add a page. So every change becomes a hunt for a freelancer, a quote and a wait. The hosting is cheap. Everything around it is not.
What managed hosting changes
Managed hosting puts the site and the server in the same hands. Wrev’s plan includes:
- Fast servers with SSL and a CDN, a firewall and malware scanning.
- Software updates, with a backup taken before every one.
- Daily backups, kept for 90 days and stored away from the server.
- Uptime and speed monitoring around the clock.
- Developers who know your site, for the changes you need.
Changing is less painful than you think
The biggest reason sites stay on the wrong hosting is fear of the change. It does not have to be dramatic. With Wrev, moving a WordPress site is part of the plan: we check it, move it onto our hosting with no migration fee, and switch over when you are happy with it.
One or two of these signs is normal. Three or more, and your hosting is probably costing you more than it saves. Book a demo if a few of these sound familiar.
Speak to a developer, not a salesperson.
Pick a time that suits you and bring whatever you want to ask.
