The projects grow and a lot. Sometimes, beyond what we expect. That’s why in this article I’m going to tell you what the signs are that your current hosting plan is not working anymore and that you have to move to the next level.
I recently improved my hosting plan and that’s why I want to share the different reasons that led me to make that decision.
Don’t be angry with your hosting company
When sites grow and the server starts to crash, it is natural to get angry with the web hosting provider. You think, “I’m paying for a service and it’s not working”. But you have to be very careful because you are actually paying for certain resources and these are finite.
Therefore, you have to change your approach and think that the logical thing to do is that if the server does not resist the load anymore because of so much traffic, it is because you need to move on to the next plan.
Now, let’s start with the signals.
1. Proven increase in traffic
If your site’s traffic has increased recently, then that makes more demands on the server. Therefore, it may still support the load, but it may also start having problems.
The important thing about traffic is that you can measure it. For that it is indispensable to have Google Analytics installed.
I recommend that you take into account not only the general traffic of a day, a week or a month. You should also pay attention to the traffic peaks that can occur in an hour or just minutes.
2. Slowness
When the pages of the site take several seconds to load it is because something is wrong. Among all the things that may be failing is the server.
You can also notice this slowness when you use the site as an administrator. In the case of WordPress, for example, when you write a new article or perform some maintenance task.
However, before considering that the problem is the hosting plan, the website must be optimized. To do this, it is essential to use caches, compressed and lightweight images, load compressed scripts, among many other necessary improvements.
3. Constant falls
If the server starts to crash too often, it’s probably because it’s no longer able to cope with the traffic. The key is to detect if the moments when they fall coincide with the traffic peaks.
Again, if you use WordPress, from experience I recommend that you consider a moment of high traffic when you generate content or perform tasks in the administrator. Especially if you use a page builder such as Elementor.
I use Elementor and consider it one of the best WordPress plugins. I have put together some nice posts and improved the CTAs of articles where I recommend affiliate products.
However, Elementor is quite heavy and can cause crashes in your server if you have enough traffic and a hosting plan with insufficient resources.
4. Strange errors
One of the problems I kept having was the appearance of strange errors. The server would go down and it could be because a process had crashed, or because a plugin had corrupted the database, or because I had run out of disk space.
The underlying problem was that the server was running out of memory. And that gave rise to a large number of problems. You only had to look at the logs to see the anomalous behavior. The solution was simply to increase the memory capacity of the plan.
5. Support recommendation
Finally, when contacting support they will probably recommend you to change your plan and go to a better one. And here the doubt is if they really make this recommendation because they believe it or because they want to sell you something extra.
I think you have to be confident with the hired hosting and especially with the technician who gives support, which is not necessarily a sales person.
In general, if I contact support for a problem that I suspect is related to the capacity of the contracted plan, I ask the technician what he thinks about it.
EN 
ES