Today, no business can grow without a steady online presence. A shared hosting package may be a working solution for a small startup. As of 2025, over one-third of all websites are hosted on shared servers.
With the right strategy, an online business is bound to start generating more traffic and have higher resource demands.
Basic hosting packages explained
Shared hosting plans are developed for small businesses with minimal storage and bandwidth requirements.
While basic shared hosting plans are sufficient for personal blogs and small websites, they are not viable for growing online stores and other businesses with a solid market footprint.
Signs it's time to upgrade your hosting plan
There are tell-tale signs when your business website needs a more robust hosting plan. Here are some of them.
Slow page loading
A business needs to move beyond basic hosting as soon as its site experiences latency or becomes unreachable due to traffic surges.
Suppose an online business’s popularity has naturally outgrown the capabilities of a shared hosting plan. In that case, its owner should shop around for a more scalable solution like a dedicated server or managed VPS hosting.
Both plans provide more disk space, computing power, and bandwidth than shared hosting.
Security concerns
The more popular a business grows, the more attractive target for cybercriminals its website becomes. According to a report from the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, a cyberattack occurs every 39 seconds.
When a business migrates from a shared hosting plan to a VPS, or the cloud, it can rely on enhanced security features, such as encryption protocols, a robust firewall, and more sophisticated identity and access management tools.
Scalability and customization
Basic hosting plans are cheap and straightforward, but their affordability often comes at the expense of limited scalability options.
VPS, managed VPS, and dedicated hosting plans provide more flexible server configurations, while cloud hosting is the most scalable solution.
Limited support
Gartner predicts that businesses will spend 9% more money on IT services in 2025 than they did a year ago, suggesting that more and more companies are moving away from basic hosting packages with limited customer support.
Managed hosting packages offer more reliable customer support than their VPS and cloud hosting alternatives, albeit the latter two are more scalable.
Benefits of upgrading your hosting plan
As soon as a website moves to a VPS, managed VPS server, or the cloud, it will benefit from having more memory, storage, and computing power.
Allocated server resources and flexibility
More server resources allocated to your site mean faster page loading, minimal downtime, and improved user experience.
Moving your site to the cloud may seem risky initially, but these concerns will disappear once you learn the cloud’s architecture and essential security widgets.
Cloud hosting plan users can adjust the resources they need on the go by turning premium features on and off, and pay only for the resources they have used.
Room for native applications
Advanced hosting packages, such as VPS, managed VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting, allow business website owners to configure the servers’ performance.
Dedicated hosting offers the ultimate server setup experience, as businesses that own bare-metal servers can pay developers to create specially tailored programs and apps. Statistics show that
In December 2024, Google Play Store featured over 40,000 new apps, compared to 140,000 developed and released in 2019.
The report suggests that even with premium hosting packages, fewer companies now have the financial resources to develop native apps.
Conclusion
So, when should growing businesses move beyond basic hosting packages?
When the website’s host cannot handle the number of visitor requests, the site becomes slow or unreachable.
You should upgrade your hosting plan when it becomes evident that your old provider cannot provide the disk space, bandwidth, or security your growing online business needs.
Last but not least, you should upgrade your hosting when you have the money to purchase physical servers. At this point, your business will no longer depend on the terms and conditions of VPS, managed VPS, or cloud hosting providers.
