Did you knowA Few Severe Reasons to Change Your WordPress Host
Web hosting is the soul of every website, the pillar that builds it and keeps it strong. If something goes wrong with the foundation, you can’t expect the site to work, but rather to collapse like a building that wasn’t built properly. As you can see, many things depend on your hosting provider, and if you can’t rely on its support and service, the one that will suffer the most will be your website.
Still, the question of switching web providers is almost as sensate as changing your hairdressers: you’d never change them unless you were no longer satisfied with the looks or the price that they’re offering. If that’s the case, don’t hesitate and don’t lose your time anymore – the market is full of quality hosting providers, and you just need to find the most convenient among them.
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Still not sure whether to switch? In this article, we’ve mentioned a few obvious signs that switching time has actually arrived.
Longer loading time than 5 seconds
As you know, the search engine ranking and generation of leads will depend on speed, as the essential factor of a website’s success. If it’s fast enough, your website can beat even more content-relevant websites. In case your website is not fast enough, there are two potential reasons for it:
You can’t manage to handle all of your requests: you’ve done things right, but the number of visitors is too challenging that request content is slowing the site down.
There are too many clients on a single server: This is an obvious sign of low-quality hosting, who wants to save by stuffing as many clients per server as possible, causing downtimes and unreliable performance.
Downtimes that appear out of the blue and can’t be easily fixed
Downtimes are so devastating that even a single one can put an end to your good reputation. They can affect SEO rankings, customer feedback, traffic or leads because visitors will certainly abandon a website that fails to respond during 50% of the time.
What does ‘too often’ mean? To make things simple, if the website is experiencing two downtimes per week, you have to change your hosting provider.
No hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime (not even cloud-hosting), but there is a good chance that some of them will do the impossible to keep you on the scene most of the time. When you’re sharing the hosting, downtimes will be likely in any case. The thing is, downtimes are sometimes even regular, but only when their overall number stays below 1%.
They don’t offer 24/7 support
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This should be an important criterion when choosing a hosting provider, and it’s usually the reason why prices differ so much. Certain providers will be there during working hours while others are on the other side of the line the entire day, and while you may think this isn’t a big problem, it affects the core of waiting hours.
Therefore, ask them, and test their accessibility when you don’t have a problem at all. You don’t want to face the cruel reality of working with an overwhelmed provider once you already have an emergency. Another thing you should definitely consider are their support channels and whether they use the one that is suitable for you (emails, phones, etc.).
Another thing we’d like to remind you of is: do not to rely on your provider’s old fame. The provider was probably awesome when you purchased it, but there is still a chance it didn’t outgrow modern technology challenges and business growth.
Let’s say you were an amateur that sold dog cookies on Etsy as a hobby, but your idea was so good that it developed into a million-dollar business. The server might be helpful and dedicated, but still not able to respond to the specific needs of your growing business.
Messing up the database connection
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In case you’re experiencing errors while establishing the website’s database connection, that’s a clear sign that you have a plug-in problem, or that the hosting service failed to deal with it appropriately.
Don’t forget that whatever happens, support is supposed to be there for you and if they can’t assist you, you should already be looking for someone who can.
Most of your support tickets are related to the server
You’re up to no good. Even if those tickets are about random downtimes, and even if you’re aware of the slowness of your website, server tickets are just not good. Certain companies accept this situation, and even have automatic replies to let users know what is going on:
Dear Mr. Jones,
We apologize deeply for your inconvenience.
We’re handling the issue, and we expect it to be solved as soon as possible.
Please contact us for other queries.
Kind Regards,
Jessica Smith
OK, regular maintenance is fully understandable for users or even an HDD failure, but dealing with this issues every week doesn’t make your website that successful.
Mailbox complications and emails falling through the crack
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The conclusion in such situations is that configuration is wrong, and you’re undergoing a maintenance crisis. Another similar case is when you’re unable to attach all the files you want in a particular email, which probably indicates that you should upgrade the server or switch to a more modern system (hardware and software!).
Internal errors you have no idea about
WordPress reports many internal errors, most of them frustrating and difficult to solve. The deal with it is that an error message appears in front of the user, but there is no direction on how to fix them.
As long as these internal errors appear once per year, they can still be categorized as ‘normal’. Once they break the boundary and start appearing more frequently, you will need to change the hosting provider and find one that can do better configuration.
Limited MySQL databases
The business is growing, and you, therefore, need many new themes and plugins to refresh your website and to make it more functional. For the purpose, you need a separate MySQL database for each WordPress copy and a hosting provider that can allow that. Therefore, if you are dealing with a provider who limits your databases, change it.
Impossibility to upgrade to the next tier hosting
One famous trick of unreliable hosting companies is to respond negatively to the growth of your business: you finally have the hits you dreamt of, but the provider calls you to notify you that they have to shut down the website due to increased number of resources and that your website is affecting the server’s balance.
Yes, we understand your frustration! Do they actually mean that your successful SEO and devoted marketing strategy is a problem? The truth is that they don’t have that much of a choice; they were not designed to handle that much traffic in such a short period. That should show you that your web hosting firm just failed to provide you with the virtual server you needed.
It’s not about the way they handle your problem, but about the time you spend explaining it to them.
Do we really need to say anything else here? You’re dealing with a poor, ‘wanna be’ knowledgeable customer support. Calling them to report a problem usually makes the problem worse because they don’t understand what you need them to do, and it usually takes you at least five replies per ticket to get to a solution. Sounds like a good moment to look for a new provider, doesn’t it?
Your site got suspended
Hosting providers happen to take their suspension rights too seriously, meaning that they can take your website down for whatever silly thing that comes to their mind, overage for instance. However, their right to do so is legitimate only when they suspect you to have performed an illegal activity.
They are supposed to do the complete opposite, and try to keep your digital real-estate on the web for as long as possible. Taking it down, they’re only showing you that they don’t care enough, and you should seriously reconsider your intentions to give them your money.
Your communication with them is a two-way road, and if you feel at any moment that they don’t perceive it as such, switch, and join a company that genuinely cares.
Security concerns
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It’s not like there is a hosting provider that can protect you from cyber threats 100%, that’s the sad truth we all have to accept.
What you can do, however, is to choose a hosting provider that offers excellent quality anti-malware software on its control panel.
The best choice is DDOS protection, even if it’s quite rare due to its price and inability to function accurately on shared hosting. If you can afford it, go for a provider that can deal with DDOS.
Your hosting service should be a reliable one because it’s the foundation of your online presence. So if you feel like it’s time to change it, then you should definitely do it. Choose your host wisely and you will ease your mind from worries related to website downtime and security concerns.
