Migrating from shared hosting to dedicated servers – Things to consider

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that a major chunk of the blogging community prefers shared hosting to dedicated hosting, mainly because shared hosting is cost effective, cheap and easy to hop on to, while dedicated hosting comes with it a thread of problems. In fact, shared hosting works for anyone who’s started blogging and works fine until he reaches the traffic avalanche period. Shared hosting packages are easier to find, cheaper and easy to set up, all you need is to pay, click and install. I preferred shared hosting when I started blogging, grabbing one from hostgator wasn’t that hard a decision. But when the traffic started to roll in, the servers went to a standstill more than once, several to be honest. And this had created some issues with the site, and wasn’t really a smooth ride mostly. The reason why I hadn’t moved to dedicated hosting is that I didn’t care much about it until the traffic bumps came up, to be precise carelessness. Also, I had been taught that dedicated hosting was very expensive only a few could afford. But to my surprise this was wrong – until I met the guys from Knownhost. (More about that later)

Dedicated hosting v/s Shared Hosting – Major Issues Comparison

1. Shared Hosting cannot take social media traffic
Even if you use plugins and caches, shared hosting can make your blog burn up resources when in times of huge traffic especially from social media where you can expect anything to happen anytime.

2. If you share, your hosting guys will consider other sites and won’t prefer you over them
Since a lot of websites will be hosted in your shared host, your hosting guys will have to consider everyone equally, and in trouble times they would simply pull the plug to your site rather than waiting to solve it. This might make you put your head down.

3. Shared hosting is really for starters, not for the professional
Seriously, shared hosting is not really optimized for professional serious guys with blogs. If you want whole lot of traffic, then you better scale up and offer a dedicated hosting.

But, migrating to dedicated hosting is not easy. And you got to select your partner carefully. Here are a few things I found that could confuse you.

1. Don’t go for offers
There are quite a bunch of guys who really offer some good discounts and deals but they have the catches. Like one web host I found that was offering really cheap prices, did not offer support to migrate from shared to dedicated, they said they’d expect the users to do it themselves. Of course, they would help, but it would come at a price.

2. See whom you can trust in the long run
Remember, you are making a decision to which you have to stick to for a long time. You cannot afford to move around hosts, every time there’s a problem. Find out who are the trustworthy guys out there and contact them for a better price than the published rates. Most of them are willing to discuss.

3. Find a team who’ll guide and support you through trouble times
Moving to a dedicated host doesn’t mean the end of all problems. You can expect minor glitches here and there like adding domains, database management, FTP etc which are not easy like plug and play in shared hosting. In such cases only a good support team can help you, so make sure you have one.

4. Published rates are not for all, you can get a better price if you ask
Not sure if this will work for all, but at least for some, it should. If you have a decent traffic and some traction there, may be the hosting company can benefit from you. You can leverage on this and ask them for a better rate than the published rates, most of them agree to discuss further. Try it, only a crying baby gets the milk.

In my personal experience, I’ve come over several dedicated and VPS hosting companies. I’ve tried out a couple of them, bought their services to try out, but there’s only one guy whom I liked in all ways – Knownhost.

They are relatively less popular, but that doesn’t mean at all that they are small. They’re in fact better than many of the big players out there. And what I found striking is their willingness to support and help. You know, I believe in imperfection, when ever you deal with imperfect people, you can find that they have a passion to excel, a willingness to learn and help others. I found this with these guys, and I can quite boldly state that you won’t find that enthusiasm in many of the established and popular hosts out there.

After I made the decision to move to knownhost, all I had to do was make the payment and ask them to “go”. They migrated the entire site from the old one to the new server, smoothly with proper guidance and help. So much that I didn’t do anything at all but to change the nameserver info from my domain registrar ! That’s so impressive.

I don’t want to sound like they’ve bought DSB, but do check out their options and you’ll know what I mean. And also, they come cheap starting at $25 per month.

So if you’re looking for a dedicated host, VPS host, I can blindly introduce you to Knownhost. They’re one of the best I know.

Do let me know if you’ve been running on them, or are planning to anytime soon.

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