Hosting for high-traffic websites

Whether your website is taking a battering from too many users, or you just want to ensure smooth performance in the future, you’re probably thinking about upgrading your web hosting. While ‘power users’ often see their projects bumping up against the limits of standard hosting, the cloud offers the ideal new home.

Whether you're website is taking a battering from a sudden influx of new users, or you just want to futureproof your website's performance, you're probably thinking about upgrading your web hosting. If your projects are pushing the limits of standard hosting packages, it may be time to consider powerful cloud servers.

What is a power user?

The term ‘power user’ is used across various technology industries. It refers to someone who makes use of the most advanced features of a product or service. Power users will have higher demands than the average customer, but at the same time, they don’t necessarily have a high level of technical expertise.

In a web hosting context, power users are the ones running high-traffic websites and other intensive applications like ecommerce. If you’re an advanced hosting user, you might be running your high-traffic site on a shared hosting platform.

Maybe this hosting solution met your needs early on, but as the business grew and demand increased, shared bandwidth and processing power just couldn’t keep up.

The limits of shared hosting

With contention from multiple users on the same server, shared hosting can face major limitations. Even on top-end packages, a shared platform will always struggle to cope with higher traffic volumes.

More visitors doesn’t just mean more people looking at your site, it means more simultaneous requests, more data flying back and forth, and more work for the server.

When shared hosting is stretched to its limits, you can expect slow loading times, frustrated customers, and lost sales, especially when ecommerce transactions are involved. That’s not to mention the potential damage to your organisation’s reputation.

Needless to say, a major issue for any online business – so what do you do about it?

Upgrading from shared to dedicated hosting

The obvious remedy is an upgrade to a dedicated server. But as outlined, just because a power user has high requirements, they’re not necessarily a hosting expert themselves. Setting up, maintaining and securing a server can be complex and time-consuming, requiring a specific skill set.

Even if you’re an experienced developer with in-depth knowledge of your coding language of choice, you still may not have the time or expertise to manage your own server.

What are your options if you want the performance of your own server resources, but don’t want to run it yourself? Sure, you could hire a server admin to do it for you, but a more cost-effective and flexible solution is managed hosting on a cloud platform.

Cloud hosting for power users

On a next-gen cloud hosting platform like CloudNX, resources are completely dedicated to you, with your projects totally isolated from the activities of other customers. In this way, it’s exactly the same as having your own dedicated server – just with virtualised resources instead of a physical box.

But unlike a conventional server, our platform offers a managed option. This takes away the complexity of server and operating system admin, while still offering a tailored environment for your chosen scripting language or app.

Just choose your stack components (scripting, web server and database) and Fasthosts provides the knowledge and skills to keep the environment secure and up to date, leaving you more time to spend on the business-end of your projects.

Less friction, lower overheads and no server maintenance required – all this adds up to streamlined projects, and potentially reduced time to market.

Lose the complexity, keep the options

But are there any downsides to skipping the server admin? Our managed cloud hosting provides a solution for users who don’t want or need root access – the ability to change any file on the server and install server-wide applications. For heavily customised setups, root access is typically preferred, but often it’s not a requirement. Managed cloud hosting still gives users all the tools they need to run a huge range of applications, no root access required.

And if you do need servers with root access later down the line, the platform has you covered. CloudNX provides one central interface for all your virtualised services, allowing you to spin up virtual machines with a choice of Windows and Linux operating systems alongside Managed Stacks and Applications, all from a single, intuitive control panel.

More performance, more flexibility

For power users, another demand is flexibility. High-end hosting needs to offer resources that can be dynamically scaled in line with current demand. This isn’t possible on shared hosting without taking the time to upgrade the hosting package, or on physical dedicated servers, which require hardware to be switched over manually.

Power users also want room to grow. Projects can start off small, but with expectations for future expansion. Once again, you don’t want to be locked into a hosting plan or physical server that won’t be up to scratch in a few months’ time.

With next-gen cloud services, you have the ability to increase or decrease server resources on demand. So whether you need to add extra RAM and processors to cope with a momentary spike in web traffic, or spin up new software stacks as part of a long-term plan, it’s all possible on a single virtualised platform.

Find out more about the latest cloud server technology from Fasthosts on our site. Or, get in touch by phone, email or live chat, and our experts will be happy to explain how we can take your web hosting to the next level.