One of the first things to consider when starting a business website or blog is the type of hosting platform you want to adopt. And one of the first decisions in this space is generally to opt for a Shared Hosting provider.

Shared Hosting is the most cost effective option available, and is generally suitable for a small business or a newbie blogger. Unfortunately, once your website starts to gain some traction, (and we all know that’s destined to happen, right?) the shared platform will begin to show its true colours. These types of arrangements are not for busy sites because the host does not apply enough resources to your site to maintain continuous performance against high traffic volumes.

At this point it is generally time to move up the ladder in terms of hosting complexity and cost, and move to a Virtual Private Server.

As Marketing Director of EuroVPS, Max Kleeman says: “A VPS isn’t gold star level, because your site is still operated off a server with other websites. The improvement however comes in the unique set of resources provided to you. Your site is sectioned off from the others, so there’s no need to worry about noisy neighbours.”

Even more refined of course, is a dedicated server, which, as the name suggests, gives you 100% control over all the resources of the server, providing the highest level of performance and reliability.

Here are some issues you might be experiencing that mean your current hosting platform is no longer up to scratch

Slow Loading

Everyone has experienced long loading times on a website, and it is highly frustrating. If the server from which you are operating is a little crowded your clients and visitors will be feeling the same frustration, and if you don’t correct the issue they will stop visiting.

Long load times on your website may not be caused by your own traffic. On a shared hosting system, if one of the other sites on the server gets a spike in visits that will drawn resources away from your site.

If you are seeing long load times, or worse, freezing on your site, it is definitely time to upgrade.

Location

When determining whether to move up to a more expensive hosting platform, it is prudent to understand where your visitors are based. Even the most efficient server will struggle if it is located too far away from the source of the traffic.

A server located a long distance from the user base will suffer from poor route optimisation, and congested bandwidth. Whether these issues appear or not, however, as a general rule you will get the best performance from a server that is local to your clients.

Reliability

There is no getting around it – if your site crashes, it is costing you money. Whatever the cause of the down time, whether it’s resources being drained by other sites on your server, or malicious Denial of Service attacks against the host, your site being regularly unavailable to visitors is unacceptable and a sure sign it is time to upgrade.

If you have sole access to the resources of the server, whether you have taken the path to a dedicated server or a VPS, your reliability experience will be greatly improved.

Duplication

Occasionally a host will create and store a subdomain of your site, which duplicates your content. Google and other search engines will note the duplication, which is likely to have a negative impact on your rankings.

This duplication is a sign of an unprofessional outfit, and is a key indicator that you should be looking elsewhere.

IP Address Issues

It is very difficult to understand if your website shares its IP address with a site that has been blacklisted. However, if it does, there is a very good chance your Google ranking will be adversely affected.

If you have taken a VPS or Dedicated server, one of the benefits will be the unique IP address, which will eliminate this potential problem.