How To Cope With Periods Of High Traffic On Your Website
An increase in site traffic is an obvious sign that your online business is doing well. When you have more visitors to your website, it typically coincides with having more business – and that’s great!
But if your site is using shared hosting, sometimes popularity can get a bit too much to handle. Downtime can be disastrous for your business, and if the load on your shared hosting becomes too great that’s just what you’ll get. If no one can view your site because it can’t handle the traffic coming its way, then your popularity is going to suffer.
So how can you keep up with site traffic demands as your company grows? Here’s how: with a VPS, or virtual private server.
What is a VPS?
A VPS is a bit like a shared garden with separate allocated spaces, whereas shared hosting is like a public park. With VPS, you have an allotted portion of a server that is yours and yours alone – hence the word “private” as the P in VPS. It is still up to you to manage the upkeep, just as you have to water the vegetables in our allocated garden space, but no one else will be able to use your resources on a VPS, just like no one will snip your gorgeous petunias or pick your juicy raspberries. Even though the real estate is shared, what’s yours is yours, and no one else has access to it.
When your website uses shared hosting, it’s a bit of a free for all, just like public parks. There may be a great tennis court and a lovely swimming pool in the public park, but reservations are not accepted. With shared website hosting, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth, processing power, memory, and disk space, and whoever needs it at a given time is allowed to take it, while everyone else has to wait until resources become available. When it’s a hot day in summer, everyone in town will be headed straight to the pool; come peak online access times, everyone is on their PC or mobile potentially trying to access your website.
What happens when I outgrow my VPS plan?
Another great advantage of running a VPS is that it is scalable: there are more plots available in that shared garden. When you start to outgrow the confines of your VPS, you can upgrade to a larger package with a larger allotment of the virtual server, allowing your website to handle higher traffic during busy periods.
How will I know when it’s time to switch from shared hosting to VPS?
There are a few signs that will tell you switching to a VPS should be at the top of your to-do list. First, as we mentioned above, an increase in site traffic is a prime indicator that your website could use some extra space to stretch. However, specific business needs may also indicate the need for a change.
If your site requires reliability and stability at all times, then you may consider making the switch. There are many types of businesses that fall into this category. Perhaps you host medical records that need to be accessed at any time of day or night to treat patients. In that case, you would need to ensure your data was accessible no matter how many of your customers are trying to access your site.
Watching your company grow is a very exciting time. But if you plan ahead, you can avoid any slowdowns along the way. Take a look at VPS Cloud Hosting from Midphase today right here.