We get these questions a lot: “how do I know I have enough resources?” or “Do I have enough space?”. In this post i’ll try to give you some general advice in this case. You will find out how you know you’re outgroing your hosting and what to do about it.

So you are wondering if you are outgrowing your hosting account right? Here are some general issues you could have:

Website is loading slow — when your website is loading slow it might be due to the fact that your website is asking for more resources than you shared hosting account is allowed to use. You can contact your webhosting provider for this to see if that’s the case. You could also look into optimizing your databases and web pages. Joomla and WordPress in general will request more server resources. So do not take the “cheapest” hosting plan available but the strongest for a fair price.

Mysql errors — when you get mysql errors this might be a sign that you are having too many visitors/requests from the web page and your hosting account isn’t suitable anymore. You can ask your provider if you are hitting your limits to figure out if this is the case as well.

Timeouts — when your website is giving timeouts, either your webhosting provider their server is having issues, their DNS is having issues or you are hitting your resource limits. It’s always better to open a ticket with your provider first before jumping to conclusions.

So right now you are wondering, well… yes I  have all this… so what now? Here are some things you could do:

Upgrade — you could contact your hosting provider and ask them for a more advanced hosting package with more resources. Be sure that you know the exact resources you need and your provider offers, to avoid further website issues.

Purchase a VPS — what will help for certain websites is that you upgrade your hosting plan to a VPS. With a VPS you have more dedicated resources and you can setup the software yourself. This means that you can edit and optimize all your webserver settings and mysql settings for your website. This is ideal.

Get a managed host — if you do not know how to do this, get a managed host. We for instance offer FREE managed solutions on all our VPS and dedicated server plans. This means that you do not have to waste time on managing your own server, and we offer our knowledge for free 😉

I hope this post helped and makes hosting for you a little bit more understandable. If you still have any questions — leave a comment below.

We offer all kinds of hosting services, check out our Webhosting here, or our VPSses here… or maybe you want a dedicated server?