A lot of small businesses and beginner bloggers choose shared hosting for its affordability and if they choose a good provider, it will serve them well. However, as with any website the larger it becomes the more server resources it starts to consume. Eventually, there comes a time where your website has simply outgrown its hosting plan. Below are some typical signs that indicate it’s time to move on from your shared hosting plan and choose one that will be able to keep up with your website’s demands.
Your website loads forever

Nobody likes slow websites. According to statistics an internet user on average expects a page to load under 2 seconds. If it takes more than that users are half as likely to abandon a website. Even if you have “unlimited” bandwidth as part of your shared hosting plan, it could be that your website exceeds the amount of resources it’s been allocated. If your website receives more than a few hundred visitors a day, you should definitely upgrade you hosting plan.
Your Website Experiences often Downtimes

Shared hosting providers tend to host hundreds if not thousands of websites on one single server. The more crowded the server is the slower it will perform and eventually overload. This results in a downtime. Not to mention, if one of the websites overloads a server by using up more resources, the server might go down as well. So one website can bring down hundreds of others on the same server. Not only will you lose traffic when users won’t be able to reach your website, it will also affect your search engine rankings. You should consider other options if being down for days during a short period of time is the norm for your website.
You can’t seem to keep hackers at bay

Most of the time it’s the website’s code that leaves a vulnerability for hackers to exploit. While you can vouch for your website’s security, you cannot do the same for hundreds of other websites on the shared server. All it would take is for attackers to compromise one website and they could easily bring down the rest by getting to the server. Even moving to something like a VPS hosting will lower the risks significantly.

Good web hosting doesn’t have to be expensive, while shared hosting is a good starting point, there are many other types of hosting that could greatly improve a website’s performance while still being decently priced. For example, VPS hosting is often recommended as the next step up from Shared Hosting. Cloud hosting can be an excellent choice for those who want both speed and unlimited resources at an affordable price. While dedicated hosting is the priciest of them all, if your business suddenly grew and you have some extra budget to spend, this would be an optimal choice.