How to migrate from shared hosting to VPS?

If you do everything right when moving a site from one hosting provider to another, your web resource will work «in a new place» in 3-24 hours. Let’s consider the main nuances of this process.

The role of the VPS server

Moving to VPS hosting is logical if you have grown as a company or community on the Internet. Moving from shared hosting to VPS hosting involves ordering a VPS and transferring sites that were on shared hosting to the VPS service. You can transfer sites between services both independently and with the help of specialists

VPS Hosting – Virtual Private Server is a virtual space on a very powerful machine. It’s like a small computer inside a supercomputer dedicated to your website. Unlike Shared Hosting, where you get full access to the promised resources. It means that the resources of the physical server will be divided into several independent virtual servers, which will eventually be used by clients.

The word «private» is not just used in a VPS, because even if you share the resources of one physical server with other clients, you will only work with your RAM, CPU, and another capacity.

When should you buy a VPS and not regular hosting?

If you are in doubt about the need to rent a VPS, then first carefully assess the condition of the website. You may have one of the symptoms:

• Problems with cybersecurity

If you realize that you are missing some cybersecurity solutions, or for advanced monitoring, data backup, and automatically additional data space, you should consider the option with a VPS server.

• Traffic volumes have increased significantly

If you are a small company and just starting to build your first website, you are unlikely to have high traffic. In such cases, you can use shared hosting. If you already have a certain audience and it is growing, then the usual shared hosting will not be enough. After all, in the case of sharing the resources of shared hosting, in moments of high workload of neighbors, you will feel the lack of traffic.

• The website is slow

If you use large amounts of RAM, then shared hosting will not fit your plans. Eventually, as your site and content grow, such hosting will only increase page load times. Once you face this problem, it means that you do not have enough resources that you have and should change the type of hosting. When using a VPS, you can scale all resources as needed without fear of overloading and slowing down.

• You have an online store

If you plan to create an online store, the VPS server is considered one of the most secure and convenient hosting options. Moreover, the protection of the VPS server is organized in such a way as to create all the conditions for passing the test for compliance with the PCI security standard. Such a test will prove that you have implemented the necessary technologies and measures to protect customer data from leakage and theft.

Recommendations when switching to VPS hosting:

To do:

• Do a page speed test before switching to a new service provider. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to test before and after switching to VPS. This way, you can know for sure if switching to VPS really helped you or not.
• Always back up your site. Download the backup and save it for future reference.

Not to do:

• Doesn’t depend on automatic backups. Always back up and be safe.
• Never host sites larger than the capabilities of the hosting package you purchased. Try to balance the distribution of space and resources.