MBA1316 Upgrading Your Website Hosting When You Grow

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Things will be slow, they'll be sluggish and the experience for your customers will not be ideal. In fact, it can cause you to lose customers and create a bad reputation for your buying experience. So in today's episode we're going to talk about how to know when to start upgrading your hosting. Hosting is like the server power that powers your website. When is a time when what are your options, how much does it cost and what's the procedure in going about making this happen? In my journey as an entrepreneur, I've used all different kinds of website hosting. I've upgraded my hosting several times. I've been through the different phases. So no matter how tech savvy you are or not, I'M going to give it to you in plain English how to take care of your website as you grow. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, your business is rolling. You're starting to grow. You're getting more traffic to your website, to your blog, and you need to start upgrading your website. Things are slowing. So first of all, you may not realize how much traffic you're getting. So the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a way to know how many visitors you're getting a month. An easy way to do that is Google Analytics. We have a episode on Google Analytics here on the show. You can just search our website over at 100mba.net show but depending on how you manage your website, whether you have a Squarespace site or a WIX site, or a WordPress website or custom built site, some of these frameworks have these tools in them. But Google Analytics is probably the most surefire way to know your visitors per month. Now, you might be getting a lot of visitors for several reasons. Whether people are checking out your website, your product, your blog posts, your podcast episodes you got mentioned in an article somebody's referring you, you can get some traffic. Now, when you're starting out and you're getting, you know, a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand visitors a month, a shared hosting solution is totally fine. And when I say shared hosting, most of us, when we sign up for a website like on Squarespace or Weebly or any of those website builders, you're on a shared host. That means that you're on a server that's shared with other users, so the whole server is not yours. And that's totally fine because you don't have a lot of traffic, you don't need all that power in the first place. And when you're getting started, you just want to get started as low cost as possible. But if your site is growing and your business is growing, you don't want to have any kind of interruption of service or a slow site where pages load slowly, where things timeout, especially during checkout. So in this case, you're going to need to upgrade. So no matter what you use for your website, the first thing is to know, hey, when is it time to upgrade? And in my opinion, once you start hitting 2 to 300,000 visitors a month, it's time for you to start thinking about getting what's called a dedicated server. Now, this doesn't mean you have to have an actual machine in your home or your office. This can be virtual this could be in the cloud and that's fine, but that just means that the whole server is yours. So again, this is why it's so important to know how many visitors you're getting every month. So once you hit that 2 to 300 mark, it's time for you to start considering this upgrade. Now your first step is to contact whoever is hosting your site. If you don't know, find out who actually put your site together. It could be a web hosting solution like HostGator or Bluehost or something like that, or it could just be built into your website solution or builder like Squarespace or Weebly contact them because they most likely have a higher end package for somebody who wants a dedicated server. It's not something maybe they display on their site because not everybody is going to get to the point where you're talking about most people fizzle out before they get to two to 300 visitors. Or pat yourself on the back, you're doing a great job. So you gotta contact them and say, hey, I'm doing a great job. Can you upgrade my server to a dedicated server? Because I'm getting a lot of traffic and I don't want any kind of interruption of service or a slow experience. They should be able to help you out and that's kind of the easiest way to do it. Now if you have a custom server or you're working off a WordPress website where you're using something like WP engine or you're hosting on like Hostgator or something like that, you have a few options here. You can either move your site to your own server or you can ask these companies that you're already on to migrate you to a dedicated server or what they call a vps, which is a virtual private server. Again, still in the cloud and everything like that. But now you have the server here yourself and you can have, you know, a million plus visitors and you're good to go. It's solid and it's a whole lot more reliable, but it's also quite expensive. Now depending on who you're hosting with, it can range from $150 a month to maybe even $600 a month. Like with WP Engine, it's about $600 a month. WP Engine is like the premium hosting solution for WordPress websites. Their customer support is amazing. We've been using WP Engine for a long time. Full disclosure, they are a partner of ours. We've been using them for years. If you want a discount, check out our site100mba.net resources you'll see a deal over there, but it is the premium option. They're known for their service, they're known for their uptime, they're known for just amazing, amazing quality, speed and reliability. And for us, our site is our baby. All our business is done online. We don't have a brick and mortar so we can't take chances. We got to make sure that it's amazing. So moving to a dedicated server is going to cost you between 150 to $600 a month, but it's going to ensure you have stability. So now that you know that you need a certain amount of traffic to move up to a dedicated server and the price point, are there any other options? Well, yeah, there are. One of them is using either like something like AWS, Amazon Web Services or something like DigitalOcean. This is like the Sam's Club or like the wholesale shop for servers. It's going to cost you less to have a dedicated instance or server, but it's going to cost you some upfront money because you're going to need some help to set it up. It's not something pretty straightforward and you can't just call up Amazon, say hey, can you set me up my server over here? It's kind of a self serve thing. So you'd have to hire a freelancer off upwork or something like that and say, hey, I want to move my website from this place to this place. They're going to have to change your DNS and all that kind of stuff. It may take something between, you know, five and 10 hours at the most, you know, but I would say about five hours or so. So even if their hourly rate is about, you know, 70 or $80, you're talking about, you know, something like three or $400 or so. But it's done once and you're gonna log in just like you normally log in. It's just that the server is gonna live somewhere else. It's gonna be more cost effective in the long term. But you don't have that like customer support, dedicated team looking after your server just in case you need any help or any kind of assistance. That's what you get with something like WP Engine or hostgator or things like that where you, you can just contact them and say, hey, I want you to do something for me and they take care of you. Something like DigitalOcean or AWS. It's self serve. So now you know how much volume, how much traffic you need to have to start migrating and Start improving and going to a dedicated server. You know, the first step is to contact your website host, whoever is running your website right now and see if they have that option to go to a dedicated server. You have a couple other options going WP engine, hostgator, they have some options. Hostgator is on the lower end of the price, the BP engine is on the higher end. Or you can go low cost for a dedicated server with AWS or DigitalOcean, but you're gonna have to have some sort of setup, somebody to come in and set you up and migrate your site to that infrastructure.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want to give you my recommendation to what you should do if it's time to upgrade. I would first contact whoever's hosting your website. If you have a Squarespace site, one of those page builder sites where they actually host your website for you, not only give you the tools to do it, if you're not sure if it does it for you, then you could just contact them, say hey, do you host my website as well? And they'll tell you yes or no. If they do, ask them do they have a way to move to a dedicated server to improve your hosting? If they do, go with that option first. Why? Because moving off a page builder type of website like Squarespace or Weebly or Wix, it's not an easy thing. You'd have to kind of reproduce the site somewhere else. But if you have something like a WordPress website or a custom built website and you're using a different kind of hosting again, find out who's hosting your website. See if upgrading it is an option. If you want premium service and you're on WordPress, I highly recommend WP Engine. If you're into savings, you want to save money long term and you're pretty tech savvy, like you have a degree in computer engineering, then AWS is a good option. Amazon Web Services remember, there's no support there. If something goes down, you got to take care of it. So the first two options are better for somebody who just doesn't want to worry about it or doesn't have like a dedicated systems admin to take care of your website. Well, there you have it guys. This is a good problem to have. Upgrading your server, that means you're getting a lot of people visiting your website and you need more power. It doesn't make sense when you get started to have a dedicated server, especially for your sales website and all that kind of stuff, because you're still trying to see if this thing has legs, if people actually want what you're selling. Upgrading later on should be pretty painless if you follow the steps I just shared with you today. All right, that wraps up today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you love it here, hit subscribe right now. And while you're there, why don't you leave us a rating and review on itunes or on whatever you like to use to listen to podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you have somebody who kind of takes care of this for you, like a web person that is on retainer, that's good and all. But you should know where your site is hosted, where your domain is registered to, what kind of site you have, and all that kind of stuff. It's just good to know. So if you ever sell your business, you know where these assets live. It's also good to kind of just cross reference the choices that somebody else made for you. Is it the best option for you? Is it the best economical option? Is it the best option in terms of performance for your website? So revisiting this on your own is a good thing, even if you have somebody taking care of it. Thank you so much for checking us out today and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. See you then. Take care.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.