6 Signs Your Business Needs a Hosting Upgrade

What a Hosting Upgrade Means for UK Businesses

To successfully thrive in a competitive market, you need a solid infrastructural foundation. Consider your hosting choice as the foundation that holds your business website and operations. Upgrading your hosting means you’re creating a more technically sound environment for your business to thrive.

When you’re deciding whether to upgrade, the important question to ask is: Does your current infrastructure allow you to achieve your business goals?

6 Signs Your Current Hosting Infrastructure Is Holding You Back

Even if hosting companies mean well, not all are designed to support the rapidly growing needs of today’s businesses.

Checking for these six signs can help you decide if it’s the right time to move to a new host.

1. Your Site Slows During Peak Traffic

Your website’s performance has a big influence on your business’ success. You’ve put in a lot of effort into creating a problem-solving product or providing the best possible service. But if your website is slow to load during traffic surges, this can quickly dampen your efforts and turn potential customers away.

If you run a small online store and a product suddenly goes viral, you don’t want your shared hosting service to struggle. Every extra second in load time can bounce off potential customers and result in lost revenue.

How An Upgrade Helps

Improving your hosting, such as making an upgrade to the cloud, means adding more CPU and RAM power to support the extra PHP and database queries your site generates. You’ll get faster disk I/O to read and write quickly enough for demand, and add extra bandwidth to handle surges.

2. You Face Downtimes Too Frequently

Experiencing “500 Internal Server Error pages” more often than you’d like? Unplanned and frequent downtime can not only frustrate your teams with the task of restarting server processes or rebooting VPS, but also lead to lost leads and sales.

Unplanned downtime is never good for your business, often indicating that your server is working beyond its capacity and can’t handle the extra load of high traffic, large data transfers, or background processes.

How An Upgrade Helps

Making an upgrade to your hosting, such as a move to the cloud, could bring in a more stable server, capable of handling additional demands without sudden crashes and downtime. We recommend our dedicated servers supported by BlackBox Hosting’s 99.999% uptime guarantee, so you know your online business is up and running 24/7.

3. You Experience Poor or Slow Support

Whether it’s a security breach or a performance issue, a hosting-related problem can occur without any notice. To effectively handle these problems, you need real, expert support without any delay.

Not all support from hosting providers is equal. When you’re evaluating your current host, carefully consider the type and quality of support they actually offer. Look beyond the marketing promises and determine whether you have active support from a team ready to solve complex issues, rather than a chatbot that can only answer simple questions.

How An Upgrade Helps

Longstanding IT hosting providers such as BlackBox Hosting know the value of round-the-clock, expert-backed support. This is why we have a trained and experienced team of engineers ready to answer your questions within the hour.

4. You Often Hit Your Resource Limits

Another clear sign to upgrade is if you see your CPU and RAM usage often reaching their maximum limits, and you’re excessively charged for it. 

This may be because your current shared hosting plan has restrictive, fixed resource limits. As your business grows, you add more pages, features, and visitors, which can cause you to quickly outgrow your hosting plan. 

How An Upgrade Helps

Upgrading your hosting plan may seem like the obvious next step, but you’ll need to check that your provider is ready to support your sudden growth or whether you need more advanced features.

If your provider can’t support your needs, it’s probably time to migrate to a private or dedicated cloud server over a shared host.

5. Your Business’ Security is at Risk

Cybersecurity is of the utmost importance to any business, especially for those working with highly secure systems, such as banks and financial, healthcare, and legal services. If your website or system’s security has been compromised in the past or you’re dealing with security scares, now is the right time to question whether your hosting company is really keeping you protected.

Weak security measures give way to multiple risks, from ransomware and DDoS attacks holding your business hostage to malware that doesn’t just affect you but also puts your customers at risk.

How An Upgrade Helps

The rise of cyberattacks calls for better security features. Choose a hosting provider that offers SSL certificates, DDoS protection, next-gen firewalls, and continuous monitoring as standard, and not an afterthought. You also need backup and recovery tools to restore your data quickly with minimal damage. 

BlackBox Hosting offers you this and more, taking your business security seriously with our private managed hosting. Call +44 (0)2037 407 840 to book a free trial.

6. Your Customers Report Slow Checkout Times

You’ve built a comprehensive e-commerce site with great UX, but the systems slow down when it’s time to check out. This leads to buyers abandoning their carts and getting frustrated.

Logins, checkouts, and database queries often demand high processing power and memory. Shared hosting commonly experiences noisy neighbour problems that lead to functions lagging on an already overloaded server. 

How An Upgrade Helps

Upgrading to a cloud earns you extra processing power and memory. These added resources improve the speed and performance of resource-heavy applications in online e-commerce and financial services. 

When you upgrade to BlackBox Hosting’s high-performance servers, you’ll ensure your customers aren’t left waiting for long or abandoning their carts.