When Should You Change Your Hosting Provider?

When building an online business, your web host is certainly one of the important aspects that could ensure the quality of your website for your customers. Once your website becomes successful and traffic increases, the old web host may not keep up with the growing requirements due to some inefficiencies. Or perhaps, you have a low cost service plan and you have realized to better change it to a higher quality service with good hosting features. Sometimes you may be reluctant to make the move as you anticipate it is too much trouble to switch between the providers, especially if both domain and hosting are with the same company. Unfortunately, as a website owner you can never be complacent with certain critical features and continue using the same service by compromising with the outdated attributes. In this article we will bring up some arguments that you may consider as a sensible reasons to change the web host to a new provider.

Frequent Downtime Issues

It is true that every website has its share of downtime no matter how outstanding the provider might be. Minimizing the frequency and duration of the downtime is important to avoid the site unavailability for a long time. The impact of downtime during scheduled maintenance would be minimal because the owners will at least have a chance to display a courteous message on their website with the outage details. Things will not be the same in case of unexpected outages. There could be hundreds of issues that may arise on any given day and take your website down unexpectedly. If the site goes offline frequently, even for short periods, then it is clear that provider is not offering the right kind of service that we are supposed to get. In fact, some web hosts keep their customers in dark without explaining the reason for frequent downtimes, because they don't want to expose their weaknesses in front of their customers. If things are going beyond your control and if you notice that other customers are also facing the same problem with the provider, then it a sign to move on to a new quality service provider.

Unable to Support Your Website Needs

As a matter of fact, many traditional companies with nominal experience in hosting services are getting into web hosting business by deploying their cash flow from other businesses. It is precisely the lack of technical skill and the service orientation that separates these companies from the good hosting companies. They can neither scale up their resources that is required for the online business growth, nor they can put effort in improving their service quality. Obviously, this is not what you expect to happen because as a website owner you like your host to be able to provide the expertise functionality and service to support your business.

Poor Customer Support

When it comes to customer support, you should look for technical expertise and service reliability. Not all website owners are technically competent to fix the problems that are generally associated with their sites. In such cases, the service providers should be helpful and respond to their problems, otherwise they end up with frequent downtimes or a website that is live but has deteriorated performance. Compromising with support services is same as being casual with downtime issues, because it is the customer support that comes to the rescue and assures the functionality if any problem arises with the website.

Over Paying For Current Hosting Plan

Pricing of the web host depends on the storage and the bandwidth of your hosting plan. Some providers attract their users by offering discounts when they sign up for long term plans, but eventually their price goes up after a few months. It is better not to fall for such offers, as the cost savings from the lower hosting fees will be small. However, the effort involved in changing to the new host will be significant. Overall, the effort may not offer any meaningful benefit. By looking at their discounts, sometimes you may feel that you are over paying for your current service. If you have a genuine reason to change and the features/service quality offered by other providers are significantly higher than your current service, then you can think about changing your web host to a better option.

Whether you are continuing with the old web service or migrating to a new one, you cannot completely rely on the hosting companies for maintaining quality of experience of customers with your website. The best way to minimize the duration of downtime and keep a tab on your hosting provider is via efficient site monitoring service. The earlier you find about the instances of site outages through monitoring service provider, the sooner you can work on resolving these issues.