Starting your ecommerce journey with shared hosting makes perfect sense. It's affordable, easy to set up, and gets your online store up and running quickly. But as your business grows and your store begins to attract more customers, you might start noticing signs that your current hosting solution isn't quite keeping up with your growth.
When your hosting can't keep pace with your business growth, it can hurt your sales and damage your reputation.
Let's explore the five key signs that indicate it might be time to upgrade your ecommerce hosting.
1. Slow Page Load Times Are Hurting Your Sales
Page load speed directly impacts your bottom line. Aussie businesses often increase their conversions by improving their website's speed by just a couple hundred milliseconds. For an ecommerce store using shared hosting, this means lost sales every single day.
Warning Signs:
- Pages taking more than 3 seconds to load
- High bounce rates on product pages
- Mobile users experiencing particularly slow load times
- Google PageSpeed Insights showing poor performance scores
Why Shared Hosting Struggles with Speed: Shared hosting resources are divided among multiple websites on the same server(often in the hundreds). When other sites experience traffic spikes or resource-intensive operations, your store's performance suffers. You're essentially competing for bandwidth, CPU, and memory with every other website on that server.
The Solution: Upgrading to managed VPS hosting gives your store guaranteed resources with professional management. You'll have dedicated RAM, CPU power, and storage that won't be affected by other websites' traffic, plus expert, Aussie support to optimize your store's performance.
2. Slowdowns During Peak Shopping Periods (like Black Friday)
We know your ecommerce stores can't afford downtime, especially during peak shopping seasons. Every minute your store is offline means lost revenue and frustrated customers who may never return.
Warning Signs:
- Your store goes down or slows to a crawl during high-traffic periods
- Customers report errors
- You notice downtime during promotional campaigns
- Competitors' sites remain fast when yours doesn't
Why Shared Hosting Fails: Shared hosting servers can become overwhelmed when multiple sites experience simultaneous traffic spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. If one website on the shared hosting server gets hit with a traffic surge or experiences technical issues, it can bring down the entire server, affecting your store and all other sites sharing that server.
The Solution: Managed VPS hosting provides better uptime guarantees and isolated resources with professional monitoring. You'll have redundant systems and expert support to prevent and quickly resolve any issues, ensuring your store stays online when it matters most.
3. Security
Your customers trust you with their personal and financial information. A security breach can destroy your reputation and result in significant financial losses.
Warning Signs:
- Other websites on your shared server experiencing security breaches or being hacked
- Difficulty implementing advanced security measures, as you don't have control over the server-level security configurations
- Compliance requirements you can't meet with shared hosting, such as PCI DSS
Why Shared Hosting is a Security Risk: On shared hosting, you're only as secure as the least secure website on your server. If another site gets compromised, it can potentially affect your store. You also have limited control over server-level security configurations and may not be able to implement the advanced security measures that ecommerce sites require.
The Solution: Managed VPS hosting provides isolated environments where your store's security isn't dependent on other websites. You'll have full control over any security measures you need to implement, plus expert support to ensure your store is always secure. All Coralis VPS hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, ACSC compliant, Australian infrastructure, and Imunify360 security monitoring.
4. Resource Limits
As your store grows, you'll need more server resources to handle increased traffic, more products, and more complex functionality.
Warning Signs:
- You're hitting your resource limits, such as CPU usage, memory usage, or disk space
- Slow product searches
Why Shared Hosting Can't Scale: Shared hosting plans are exactly that, shared. When you (or other websites on the shared hostingserver) hit these resource limits, your store can slow down significantly or even crash.
The Solution: Managed VPS hosting offers resources that are dedicated to your store, can grow with your business, with expert support to optimize your setup.
We can easily upgrade your plan or add resources as your store expands, and our team will ensure everything runs smoothly even during growth spurts.
5. Limited Customisation and Control
As your business grows, and your store evolves, you'll want to optimise for speed with advanced tools, or integrate specialised software, like an ERP system. Shared hosting, designed for cost-effectiveness and mass-market use, often becomes very restrictive for brands who are growing.
Warning Signs:
- Inability to install custom/advanced software
- Your developer can't edit core server files, such as php.ini
- You can't pick which version of PHP you want to use, or are locked into a version that's too old
- You can't run custom scripts that require root access to the server
Why Shared Hosting Limits Customer Experience: Shared hosting can't provide the consistent, high-quality experience that successful ecommerce stores need. Limited resources, shared bandwidth, and lack of optimization features all contribute to a subpar customer experience.
The Solution: A Managed VPS solves the control problem by providing:
- An Isolated Environment: Your website lives in its own virtual container with dedicated resources (RAM, CPU). Your activities can't affect others, and theirs can't affect you.
- Full Root Access: You and your developers get complete control to install any software and customise the server environment to perfectly suit your store's needs.
- Expert Management: The hosting provider's team still handles the complex backend work like security patches, OS updates, and server maintenance, so you get all the control without needing to be a linux expert.
What to Look For When Upgrading to Managed VPS
When you're ready to upgrade to managed VPS hosting, look for solutions that offer:
Performance Features:
- SSD storage for faster data access
- Enterprise-grade hardware, like Intel Xeon Gold processors
- Caching systems
- LiteSpeed Web Server
Security Features:
- Free SSL certificates
- Firewall protection
- Malware scanning and removal
- Security updates and patches
Reliability Features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantees (SLAs)
- Redundant systems and backups
- 24/7 network monitoring
- The ability to increase the size of your VPS as your business grows with no downtime
Managed VPS Benefits:
- Expert server management and optimization
- Proactive monitoring and maintenance
- Security updates and patches handled for you
- Performance tuning for your specific ecommerce platform (like WooCommerce)
- Technical support and advice from hosting specialists
Don't Wait Until It's Too Late
The best time to upgrade your hosting is before you experience serious problems. If you're seeing any of these warning signs, it's likely time to start planning your transition to managed VPS hosting. However, if you're not sure, our team can help you assess your current needs and recommend the best path forward.
Your hosting is the foundation of your online business. As your store grows and evolves, make sure your hosting solution grows with you. The investment in better hosting pays for itself through improved performance, increased conversions, and happier customers who keep coming back.