The need to move to VPS hosting arises in a few typical situations. Most commonly, you find you need more disk space and bandwidth. Your shared hosting provider doesn’t offer root access to get certain apps. Your website is becoming more popular, and you need to scale up to accommodate the increasing number of visitors or application users.
Your site or apps might be running very slowly or need more support and security.
If you’re in one or more of the above situations, you might need to move from a shared to a VPS plan.
Other Reasons to Make the Switch
You’ll find it a piece of cake to scale with a VPS service. It will let you add an overused resource rather than upgrade your hosting account. Another plus of this approach is that it can keep your budget within reasonable limits.
Finer tweaks and customization, in general, are unavoidable. Shared hosting is also impossible because there are many users on the server, and any change will impact each one. With the proper management of your VPS, you’ll be able to adjust your server as needed.
With shared hosting, unpredictable and underwhelming site performance is often an issue. This is because the same pool of server resources is used. It is often a deal-breaker if you’re trying to get an e-commerce store or business up and running. A virtual server can be indispensable in terms of improving speed.
Last but not least, there is security to consider. Shared hosting involves a high risk of breach, and any breach of an account on the shared server will affect all the other sites on it. VPS minimizes this risk by letting each user work autonomously in an isolated environment.
Upgrading to VPS Hosting
If you choose a self-managed VPS hosting solution, you must transfer your data to the new account manually. In this case, the process includes creating a backup, going through the setup, uploading data, and a few other steps. This section will explore them in detail.
Backup
To safely move your databases and files to the new server, you must make copies. You can use an FTP client to connect to your current hosting account for the website files. They are usually in the root folder. Go to Export to create a data archive.
Your control panel has a MyAdmin tool, which you need to make a copy of your database. This needs to be exported too. Finally, verify the data and press Go to complete the process.
Before you move forward, download your messages if you want to save your email correspondence.
Setup
Typically, your web hosting provider will take care of this for you. Most self-managed VPS hosts use Apache, Linux, PHP, or MySQL server technology.
Upload Data
Now, upload your data to the virtual server. You don’t need anything except the server destination and the file backup location for this. Make sure your connection is secure.
Go to MyAdmin in the control panel for the easiest restore. The option Import under New Database lets users choose the relevant archive and upload it to the new server.
Load the site and test the plugins to ensure nothing failed during the switch.
Change the Name of the Server
Finding the option for nameserver change is simple. You enter the nameservers given by your VPS provider and save them. It could take up to two days for the change to take effect.
You might not see a need to move your site to VPS hosting for now, but the time will definitely come. You’ll find significant improvement in uptime, performance, and security. It’s no coincidence that VPS hosting is so popular among online businesses today.
