Hosting is an irreplaceable integral part of the website’s work process. Without it, the website won’t have a ‘home’ – a place to store its databases. content and other functional elements. Moreover, it won’t have a place to bind its IP and domain to. Therefore, the hosting provider should be reliable, and its servers should be stable to provide the most useful and resourceful environment to your website for its paid price.
But sometimes even the most reliable hostings could have problems with accessibility or stability. Or even both, in the hardest times of disasters or major troubles. It does not usually mean that you should migrate your website to another hosting at the first sign of the occurring issue. Therefore, you should know not only how to choose the provider properly, but also how to determine the size, the cause and the possible solution for the problem for your website if it arises on the hosting server.
What to Know Before Hosting a Website?
The first thing every website owner and webmaster should know, even before launching the site itself, is how to pick the most suitable provider while taking both needs and future developments into account. And not only the provider’s overall reliability and resourcefulness should matter, but also the complexity and flexibility of its offered service plans. Server locations are also important, especially when you plan to make the website work on a global scale with the widespread audience.
And last, but by no means the least important thing every website owner or webmaster should take into account when picking a provider to host the website is its pre-installed CMS. This part is strictly about usability and personal preferences, so for a lot of people it has a very high degree of importance. And sometimes it can limit migration capabilities if you decide to switch to another provider in the future.
Of course, it is vital to make a thorough research before you pick the first ever hosting for your website. You should study everything from descriptions from the websites of providers themselves and up to reading various reviews from users on third-party review websites. And if you know a website or two that are hosted on a provider’s servers, then you should check webserver status from all locations with a powerful monitoring toolkit like HostTracker to at least look at the provider’s servers stability and reliability with your own eyes.
How to Optimize Website When Hosting Is Slow
If for some reason your website’s hosting is working slow, first above all things you must conduct a thorough diagnostics. Because depending on the reason the methods of resolving the issue will change, sometimes even to those that are completely out of your capabilities and even out of your line of responsibilities.
Therefore, the first thing to do if your website is working slow is to thoroughly check everything with powerful monitoring tools. For instance, you can use website uptime monitoring service host-tracker.com/en to run a set of diagnostics routines manually. Or, for the better, register and set up an automated monitoring to keep everything in check for now and in the future.
This way, with the help of the HostTracker platform capabilities, you will know what causes your website to work slower than it should in a moment an issue occurs. The system will simply send you an alert message if something happens. And if it’s something you can positively fix yourself, then you will be able to pinpoint the source of trouble and fix it. Or send a request to your hosting provider support service so that they fix the problem within their responsibilities.
For example, if it’s your website itself that’s working slow, then you can compress its media content, change folder structure, clean up the web page code and optimize databases. Basically, you need to fix everything that makes the hosting server respond longer and your website to load longer from your side.
As another possible reason for hosting-related slowdowns you can experience higher loads that the resources dedicated by the host to your service plan can handle. As a mismanagement and bad planning on your end, it’s within your responsibilities to change the service plan and fetch additional resources from the provider to support your website.
And the last, but not the least major reason for hosting and website slowdowns is the hosting itself. If the reliability and performance of their servers are lacking, or there are troubles on their end you can’t fix yourself, there are two ways to go – either to send a support request and wait for host to fix the issue (if it’s fixable) or to switch to another provider (if it’s unfixable).
When Does Your Website Need New Hosting?
There are a lot of actual reasons to pick a new hosting for your website. But the main reason is its low performance on a regular basis that doesn’t allow you to maintain your website’s accessibility, loading speeds and stability in perfect state by your standards. Especially when the harsh reality contradicts the provider’s statements placed on their main website. If the provider fails to follow their own statements, then it’s time for you to migrate the website whole to another one’s servers.
Another surefire reason to change the provider is when its support service fails to fix some constantly repeating issues on their end that messes up your website’s metrics. If you keep your website under constant monitoring with HostTracker platform’s checks, run hosttracker speed page test from any location on a daily or even an hourly basis and have a solid proof for the repeating issue and requests to fix it, then it’s time for you to migrate the website for good.
One more reason, and it could even be considered a popular one, is that another provider has really better conditions and options for you. Sometimes it happens when someone gives you advice and you give a thought and then decide to switch the provider. Rare as it may be, this is also a reason to migrate the website, especially for starting website owners and webmasters.
How to Transfer a Website to a New Hosting Company
Basically, when you pick a new hosting and decide to migrate the website to it, you need to know one thing beforehand – whether its CMS is compatible with your current provider or not. Usually this is not an issue at all, but you must check it for sure, just in case and for your website’s safety.
Then, when you checked it and ensured compatibility, make a separate backup of the website. Backup everything and anything and store it somewhere on an external disk in case something goes wrong. It will actually serve as an additional source for migration data.
After you’ve made a backup, set up a migration between two hostings according to the CMS guidelines. It’s relatively easy for every platform and requires almost nothing except the creation of the new databases on the new server with names matching the current ones on your old server.
When you’ve set everything up, start transferring all the files using whatever tool is most convenient to you. Any FTP client will work well for transferring files, but if the website is large, you should consider using a more convenient and useful SSH protocol instead.
And only after you’ve moved (or copied) all the data and files, you should double-check everything and start migrating databases. That’s the most crucial part – with PhpMyAdmin or another tool you should import old and filled databases to the new and empty ones without a hitch. Or you’d better start the process anew to not mess everything up if the migration fails on this step.
How to Know if Website Hosting Transfer Is Complete
Your website is considered fully transferred only when it has started working as good as it was working before. Therefore, to finish the migration process, you should reconfigure domain name on DNS server level and wait for it to become linked with your new hosting.
When domain name servers finish renewing the link between the new IP address and existing domain name of your website, it will start working from the new hosting. After it happens, check whether everything is working fine, and all metrics are good. Then, and only then, you could remove the website from the old hosting.
FAQs
Why is my website loading so slowly?
Websites could start loading slowly due to a number of reasons. Starting from hardware server-side hardware, server software problems or network connectivity troubles, and up to database misconfiguration, oversized media content, badly set up caching and unoptimized web page code. All those issues have potential to cause slowdowns from slight increase in response time and up to long web page loadings.
How can I speed up my hosting?
It is basically impossible to speed up hosting or its server, but you can relatively easily increase the amount of resources or bandwidth available to your website by switching to another service plan. In addition to actually fixing server-side issues, it is one of the most useful ways to actually increase your website’s performance and its speed.
Why is free hosting slow?
Usually, free service plans provided by hostings or completely free hostings are really slow for everything except one-page advertising websites or very basic websites with no additional functionality. Almost always, actually. It happens because they are working on a shared basis, and the provider literally shares its server’s resources between a large number of websites for free. Therefore, each separate website receives a relatively miniscule amount of resources.
Conclusion
Sometimes things happen and your website becomes really slow due to hosting-related issues. Taking all that was said before into account, there are three ways to handle this issue and one way to be ready for the situation beforehand, To prepare for the worst and be able to understand and remove the source of troubles it is vital to keep the website under constant monitoring with powerful tools like HostTracker toolkit. And then you can either fix everything yourself, tell hosting support to fix the problem on their end, pick a better service plan or migrate the website to a more reliable and fast-working provider.
