10 Reasons You Need Windows VPS Hosting

Are you losing business to your competitors because your site isn’t meeting your customers’ needs? Are you on a hosting platform that is HELPING or HINDERING the growth of your business? Windows VPS Hosting is a great, affordable solution for many businesses that are ready for serious growth. It can offer unique benefits over both Shared and Dedicated Hosting that you may not be aware of.

Here are 10 things to ask yourself about your business and your website to determine if you’re a candidate for a scalable, flexible, powerful Windows VPS solution.

1. Does your business rely on your website?
   In the past 10 years, a profound percentage of commerce has shifted online. If your website absolutely, positively MUST be live and operating at top efficiency 100% of the time, you can’t afford to have a hosting plan that may not deliver. A Virtual Private Server provides a number of benefits that SMBs (small-to-medium-sized businesses) require.
2. Is your site sometimes too slow to handle the traffic volume?
   That’s what we call a “High Class Problem.” And it’s easily remedied. Medium-to-high traffic sites benefit from VPS because a virtual machine is not affected by the traffic demands of other sites, as can be the case on a Shared server.
3. Do you host particularly sensitive data or have specific security concerns?
   With a VPS plan, your source and data files remain behind a secure partition, completely inaccessible to other customers. This means all your data and anything you collect from customers is ensured complete privacy. You can get the same thing with a physical dedicated server, but a VPS is more cost effective and scalable.
4. Is your business growing rapidly?
   You may not be able to accurately predict your website’s needs over the next 3, 6 or 12 months, but you DO know you are growing. A Dedicated server may be unnecessary right now – and even prove to be constraining if your growth continues. A VPS plan can offer you all the flexibility you need for growth, without committing to some major monthly overhead.
5. Is your business seasonal, with a high variability of demand?
   Seasonal businesses often experience major increases in traffic during their busy seasons. For example, ecommerce, financial services, tourism, holiday and wedding-related industries each have their own unique business cycles with corresponding bumps of traffic expected on their sites. VPS is a particularly effective solution in this case, since you can easily and quickly add and subtract additional virtual machines to support “bursting” traffic needs. So you only have the overhead when you have the revenue to justify it.
6. Is more than 20% of your business revenue generated online?
   If so, that makes you an ecommerce business. And that means that you can’t afford for your site to be offline or so slow that customers lose interest before they complete a sale. With a VPS plan, you can expect 100% Uptime and high performance, ultimately enabling a higher conversion/sales rate.
7. Have you ever had an immediate, short term need for more hosting resources?
   Maybe your biggest customer decides to run a promotion that could increase your website traffic by 1000%… in 10 days. Or what if you get the opportunity to sponsor an event attended by 50,000 of your ideal customers… and it’s 5 weeks away? What’s more, you don’t want or need to commit to a more expensive Dedicated solution for the long term; it’s just a short term situation you’re trying to solve. VPS plans have the unique quality of utter scalability in memory, CPU and Disk Space. This means you have the benefit of On-Demand Resources to meet changing needs.
8. Can you afford downtime or slow page load time?
   How much do you think 10 minutes of consecutive site downtime costs your business? How much business do you lose if your site is sluggish? Can you afford to lose any amount of business revenue? Most businesses these days can’t. A high-performing, fully-managed VPS plan may cost $5 per day but can easily save you 10x or 100x in revenues.
9. Is your time better spent building your business instead of managing server loads and configuring your hosting environment?
   Management options are always available, even if not included in a specific VPS plan. Applied Innovations offers two standard levels of management, as well as a whole menu of a la carte management services. So if you are upgrading from Shared to VPS, you can eliminate the learning curve. And compared to hiring a Systems Administrator or Developer, a Server Concierge VPS plan is a fraction of the cost.
10. Concerned that you might need a Dedicated plan in the future, but aren’t ready for it today?
    This is another way VPS offers a notable advantage: VPS plans are 100% Portable. This means your virtual machine can easily and transparently be moved to a Dedicated box if necessary. With High Availability and Live Migration, the migration process is utterly painless and completely unnoticeable to your customers.

Keep these questions in mind as your business grows and changes. You might want to even schedule a periodic audit of your business to determine if it’s time to upgrade or build a new site on a VPS plan. If you have specific questions, feel free to contact us to discuss Windows VPS Hosting options or Windows Managed Hosting solutions that will best suit your needs.