Switching from Shared Hosting to VPS Hosting

Most people start out with shared hosting. Every shared hosting plan has a control panel with it. The most popular and widely-used shared hosting control panels is cPanel. It has a great user interface and is easy to work with. Perfect for beginners. Sooner or later, everyone outgrows their shared hosting account and they move to something more powerful, either a VPS (virtual private server) or a dedicated server. When they do the switch, they don’t know what to expect and what do to. In this article, we are going to write about our experience and everything you need to know about the switch from shared hosting to a VPS.

When you should transfer to a VPS

There are no strict rules or guidelines on when to do it, but there are several indicators that can show you need to upgrade to a VPS:

You start getting a lot of traffic. The main reason why most people switch from shared hosting to VPS is that they get an influx of traffic. Shared hosting accounts may handle low to medium traffic spikes. Also, the resources are shared with other websites, so it can seriously slow down your website. A VPS will give you better and faster performances for your websites/apps.

You want to install an application that your shared account doesn’t allow you to. Most shared hosting accounts are limited to certain applications and services. If you use a VPS, you can install any application you want to, of course, as long as it meets the hosting provider’s policies. On shared hosting accounts, you are stuck with a PHP version chosen by your hosting provider. If you get a VPS, you can use whatever PHP version you want to. You can install any PHP modules you need on your VPS. There are quite a lot of applications that you can’t install on a shared hosting because you don’t have the required modules available.

When you need more resources for e-mails, FTP accounts, databases etc. Shared hosting accounts are usually limited by the number of e-mail addresses and mailing options they can use. The same goes for FTP accounts, databases and any other resource.

Contact us! We’ll help you setup your server and we’ll do all the server work for you. If you are not sure about which plan to choose or if you need any advice for your VPS, feel free to contact us. We are available 24/7 via Live Chat or via ticket. We’ll make your switch from Shared to VPS as seamless and as easy as possible.

Dedicated IP and Private Email Server

Typically, in a shared hosting environment all websites share the same web server, as well as the same email server. When a shared hosting environment is handling hundreds and thousands of domains it is also having to manage thousands of emails being sent and received. This can result in email being less reliable, causing problems sending and receiving. In a VPS environment, a company will have its own unique IP address and email will be more reliable all around. This is just one of the many benefits to having your own dedicated IP and email server. As many businesses rely heavily on email for daily operations, it makes sense to have your own email server with its own unique IP.

Dedicated Resources

With a VPS, you are allocated a certain amount of resources that are dedicated solely to your needs. Others on the same server with VPS are given their own share of resources and a minimum per VPS is always maintained. A benefit of this is that if others are not using their resources your website is able to tap into them and utilise them. With burstable resources your server is able to maintain a minimum, and utilise more power when needed and if it is available.

Separate OS and Software

A shared hosting plan uses the same operating system and software across hundreds, and even thousands of websites on the same server. The result is the possibility for many things to go wrong when a server is trying to please that many websites. With a VPS, you have a completely separated operating system that caters to your websites needs only. The benefit is more reliability, and less possible downtime.

Customisable

With a VPS, you are able to customize the system to your websites requirements. If there is a program or script that needs to run a certain way, you are able to make those changes. There are often limitations when a website in a shared hosting environment requires a customisation that a server tech is simply not willing to make noting that it will affect all other websites on that server. With a VPS, it can be adjusted and customised any way a website owner requires for success.

Added Security

Security is a concern of anyone who values their website, email, and other important data kept on a website or server. With a VPS platform, a website owner is able to customise security policies, and firewall rules to cater to their website only. This is especially important when a business needs to allow employees access to email through a secure connection. Having the ability to customise security ensures that a website owner can do what is needed to keep hackers out.   

Growth Path - Adding more resources easily

The problem with a shared hosting environment is that a website can quickly outgrow the available resources forcing them to upgrade to a VPS or a Dedicated Server. With a VPS, a user can purchase a VPS configured with the amount of resources they need. If the website outgrows its originally configured resource allocations, additional resources can typically be added from the host without making any changes to the server. As a result, upgrading is seamless requiring no downtime at all. A VPS is also configured like a Dedicated Server, if there is a need to upgrade to a dedicated server the upgrade process will require minimal adjusting and some hosts will provide zero downtime during this process.

Upgrading from a shared environment to a managed VPS is something that many website owners and small businesses will experience during their business lifetime at which time they will appreciate the benefits a VPS offers.

With a VPS, your website can have more visitors. In general, virtual servers handle a lot more traffic than a shared host. When you share a server with more people and all of them get traffic to their websites – you use up most of your shared server’s resources. If you get a traffic spike you can slow up your server and increase the loading time. A VPS can handle a lot more traffic at once compared to a normal shared hosting account. So, if you notice that your website is growing and you are getting more and more visitors each day, it’s time to migrate to a VPS.

Your website is faster on a VPS. You don’t share your server’s resources with other people, so that means that you will get much better performances. Your website will be noticeably faster if you host it on a VPS or a Dedicated server. And we really do mean noticeably. Usually, the website loading time is improved substantially if they are hosted on a properly configured VPS.

Virtual servers are more secure if configured properly. If you properly configure and protect your VPS, it will be far more secure than a shared hosting account. Your virtual private server is private to you and only you. With a VPS there are fewer chances of someone else accessing your data or resources unless you specifically grant them access, or, of course, if you don’t properly configure your VPS. If you don’t have the necessary experience that will allow you to configure and administer a Linux VPS, we wouldn’t recommend doing that on your own. A simple misconfiguration in your web server configuration files or database configuration can cause your website/app to become unresponsive. Some of our customers dive into their server configurations but they know that we have their back and can contact us anytime so we can help them or fix the problem, if any. Our customers get our top-notch managed hand-holding support which in our opinion is one of the most important features of a well-established web hosting company.

Why you should switch from Shared Hosting to VPS

As your websites grow, so do your hosting needs. If you are wondering why you should switch to a VPS, there are several reasons:

You don’t share a VPS with other random people. Although every hosting provider does their best to keep their servers as optimised and as clean as possible, you never know what the other accounts hosted on the same shared hosting do with their websites. When you switch to a VPS, you get your own private resources, dedicated to you. You get full control over your server. All of our VPS hosting plans come with full root access and our 24/7 managed support is available to help you anytime. When you get full control over your server, you can configure how it actually works and you won’t have any limitations to certain functions or resources. On a VPS with full root access, you get unlimited MYSQL databases, unlimited domains, unlimited ftp accounts and more. Of course, the term “unlimited” stretches as far as your server resources. You won’t be able to host unlimited databases or domains if your server is running out of disk space, right?