Flexible Hosting: Long contract terms and rigid hosting contracts are a thing of the past. What counts now is flexibility: the option to upgrade or downgrade tariffs at any time or to cancel monthly. However, the associated advantages are not always clear. Therefore, we explain how practical and helpful this flexibility, which hosts such as Mittwald offer, can be.
“Flexible hosting” is not a technical term. But when we talk about it in this article, we mean a hosting tariff that allows customers to book more or less service at any time with just a few mouse clicks.
Why Flexible Hosting?
Flexible hosting is advantageous when workloads change over the long term. An online shop can be under construction and continuously increase its traffic through search engine optimization, campaigns, and a presence on social media. The hosting service booked in the first quarter could no longer be sufficient in the next quarter.
It is well known how important the loading time of a website is. Not only do visitors shy away from long waits, but search engines also rate a long loading time as a negative ranking factor and therefore push a website to the bottom of the search results.
So if the traffic increases, but the performance remains the same, the result is a decrease in the number of visitors – whether as direct traffic or indirectly triggered by search engines. However, when a hosting package is downgraded, it can cost savings and greener hosting. Because if you use less power, you also reduce power consumption.
Know When To Upgrade Or Downgrade
When should you upgrade or downgrade your hosting plan? In addition to gut feeling, concrete measurement methods are needed. For this, it is essential to understand how the utilization of a server is composed. In addition to real visitors, there are also bots, requests from APIs, and more that can take advantage of the hosting plan’s performance.
The better known the website, the more frequent such automated and non-human services will stop. Therefore, conventional tools such as Google Analytics or etracker, which refer to the actual visitors and filter out the mentioned bots and API calls, could be sufficient for the evaluation. For a deeper insight, the Awstats service can help, for example.
If you want it to be more accessible, you should see a so-called load display of visits to your web host. For example, at Hoster Mittal, you get an overview of how much the booked tariff is being used.
By filtering out bots and API calls, customers receive the most fundamental value possible. A traffic light system helps to assess when an upgrade should take place. In general, it is advisable always to include a buffer when hosting. Accordingly, one would upgrade a little earlier than necessary and downgrade a little later than possible.
Because if there are peaks, for example, due to an unexpected mention in well-known social media profiles or other media, the hosting tariff has to cope with more visitors and can reach its limits. This leads to increased loading times, resulting in a decreasing number of visitors. And if it is an online shop, there may also be fewer transactions.
Perfectly Combined: Flexible Hosting And Vigilant Website Design
It’s easy to upgrade as your hosting plan’s load increases. But there is more than one way to reduce hosting plan usage. One of them is optimization. For example, if you use your analysis tool to record visitors, an additional load is generated with each call. Even large images trigger a limitation that should not be underestimated compared to smaller ones with each call.
Many extensions or plugins enable customer chats, for example, or integrate a pop-up with a newsletter registration. It is essential to weigh the individual: Is the function valuable enough to provide the required performance? So it makes sense to see what optimizations are possible. These should bring you a lot of performance in the long term and thus allow an upgrade in a more sensible framework.
