Worried About Site Performance? Pick the Right Hosting Plan

Updated November 16, 2020

Speed impacts your website success in several ways and knowing how to get the most site performance (speed), while staying within budget, is critical to your online profitability.  Choosing the right hosting is the single best decision you can make.

Think that a delay of 1 second in page loading can’t hurt your online business?  Think again!

Reports show that for every second extra that your site takes to load, your conversion rate drops by 7%.  This translates into a yearly loss of $2.5 million if your online store generates $100,000 every day.  Online, every second counts, and a slow site means fewer sales. Period.

This article is a contribution from Stefan Ateljevic.  Thanks Stefan!

So How Can You Make Sure Your Site Loads Super Fast?

One important speed fix is to pick a hosting solution that’s right for you.

For sites with growing traffic, a virtual private server (VPS) hostings often works best.  Compared to shared hosting, cloud VPS offers many important benefits. It gives you the resources you need to run your site without hassles.

Conversely, if you opt for shared hosting, you’ll share the server disk space, CPU, and RAM with others.

On the other hand, while you use the same physical server as others in VPS hosting, you get a virtual environment that fully yours. No one else can take a bite from your slice.  More private disk space and greater overall resource availability that you enjoy in VPS can help you deliver a better user experience to your visitors.  VPS hosting is also more secure than shared.

If one hosted site doesn’t follow the best security practices, it can impact other sites, as all of you share space on the same server.  In such an arrangement, other sites can overload the server at any time, and this can impact your site’s speed and overall performance.

In case of the VPS hosting, you can configure and customize your virtual server as per your requirements. Greater customization in turn guarantees uptime and stronger performance.  However, all the goodies that the VPS hosting offers come at a price. Usually, a VPS hosting plan costs more than a shared hosting. Typically, unless you start with a massive online store built on a resource-heavy platform like Magento where you start with a VPN or dedicated server, in other common scenarios you will likely scale up to a VPN in due time.

All the same, it is something to consider, because a fast browsing experience is what the online customers want more than anything, something which this infographic shows all too clearly, this money investment is really worth it. Additionally, practically all young people in the US are online and the vast majority of them conduct business and shop over the internet.

Over 98% of the people aged 15-29 use the global network extensively. Giving them what they want and serving it fast is a game changer.

Generally, VPS Hosting Solutions are of two types: Self-Managed and Fully Managed.

In self-managed VPS, the responsibility of maintaining the server, updating software and hardware, making backups, and running security checks is mostly yours. All these tasks require technical expertise and time.

If you lack in any or both, you should consider fully managed VPS hosting, such as that offered by KnownHost. Your host will take care of all the above-mentioned tasks, giving you the freedom to focus your energies completely on running your business.

Speed is something you can control.  It is closely linked to your visitor satisfaction and your online success.

Making the right hosting choice means you’ll outpace the competition while still having time to run your business.