The hosting services you are using are the foundation stone behind your website’s success. You can have the most beautiful design, the most enticing content, and the most lucrative offers. Still, if the infrastructure behind your website is flawed or outdated, you can’t really become a success.

Cloud hosting has become a raging hit among website owners in recent years. Trends show that this type of hosting infrastructure is becoming the dominant one. That’s hardly a surprise, considering physical servers have many downsides and drawbacks. Unsurprisingly, 18.3% of all website owners already use cloud hosting. Still, that number is only going to grow, as cloud hosting is, without a doubt, superior.

Still, you may be reluctant to jump to cloud hosting, especially if you feel satisfied with your current arrangement. This is completely understandable. However, that doesn’t mean you should be blind to all the signs that show that you need to switch your regular stationary server with a cloud hosting service. To make it easier for you, we’ve prepared 11 obvious signs that it’s time to switch your hosting service to a cloud one.

1. Your Hosting Plan Is About To Expire

First on our list is the most common reason people switch to the cloud. At the end of your current hosting contract, your hosting provider expects you to resign at a higher price. Still, they offer precisely the same configuration and service. So, if you are still using a regular server, this is the perfect moment to make the leap toward cloud hosting.

We at HostArmada, for example, constantly offer lucrative discounts of up to 75% for new clients. Moreover, we keep our infrastructure at the edge of current technology, so you won’t have to worry your hosting services will become outdated during your three-year contract. On the contrary, cloud hosting allows us to constantly modernize and stay on top of current trends without interfering with your uptime and traffic.

Naturally, this gives you the massive advantage of having flexibility, better security, and constant updates and maintenance.

The best part, however, is that even after the 36-month contract expires, the regular price is still far lower than what you will pay for regular servers.

To put it plainly, traditional hosting may seem familiar and more comfortable, but cloud hosting offers many more benefits for a fraction of the cost. It is highly adaptable, cost-efficient, and scalable, making it the next logical step for your website and business evolution.

Still, being stuck with an outdated hosting plan at the end of your contract is not the only scenario when you should consider switching to cloud hosting. In fact, most other signs on our list insist on an instant reaction rather than waiting for your current plan’s expiration.

2. Your Hosting Seems Too Expensive

At first sight, traditional hosting and cloud hosting seem to have similar prices. And, in all honesty, that’s not too far off. However, that’s only so if you have a very predictable traffic pattern and you don’t have rapid growth in your near future plans. Remember that the most affordable hosting plans are the triannual. So, paying a fixed price for a traditional shared server will keep you stuck at the same resources for the next three years.

Sure, you can opt to scale, but you won’t get your money back. In the best-case scenario, you must pay an additional fee for another fixed deal. However, this time, you won’t get a preferential price.

Thus, traditional servers will ultimately cost significantly more for industries where rapid growth is uncertain but possible. For example, if you are a retailer, you have a growth plan and budget accordingly. However, one of your products becomes a market hit. It goes viral, and suddenly, there is a significant surge of visitors to your website willing to buy. Unfortunately, your shared hosting server’s resources can’t keep up with the influx, and your website goes down. This would be detrimental to your business. People rarely return to websites that crashed or didn’t show. So, your potential breakthrough is instantly snuffed due to your hosting plan’s lack of flexibility.

On the contrary, cloud hosting often offers higher flexibility, allowing your website to have sudden surges while maintaining a lower overall traffic. Thus you won’t have to go to a more expensive plan, because of a few days of extra traffic.

3. Your Website Has Frequent Downtime

Another huge problem with traditional hosting plans is that they have limited resources that can’t be stretched if needed. Naturally, this often leads to downtimes, even if your traffic is low to begin with.

For example, luxurious products often count on a few but quality leads rather than massive traffic. So, if you sell expensive watches, you don’t expect a huge influx of visitors. Naturally, you might use shared hosting, as that covers your needs completely. Still, with traditional shared hosting, your server mates may drain your resources. So, even if you have only 10 visitors, your website may go down or lag. Naturally, there is a solution – you get the far more expensive dedicated server. Or you can switch to cloud servers.

With cloud servers, you can enjoy the benefits of shared hosting while still relying on the promised resources despite your server mates’ current needs. Take our shared cloud hosting service, for example. Our cloud infrastructure guarantees 99.9% uptime, even to our shared cloud hosting clients.

Moreover, we don’t limit your bandwidth as long as it is up to 10 times the average for your plan. Most importantly, due to our cloud infrastructure, we can allocate the needed resources from different machines if your server mate is hoarding most of the server’s potential. This way, you can be sure your clients will always have access to your website, regardless of the situation.

Unfortunately, you need to offer top-quality service when looking for quality leads. Thus, having your website constantly down is a huge red flag for those types of clients. So, if you start experiencing constant downtime, it’s time to immediately take affirmative action and switch to cloud hosting. Otherwise, the damage to your reputation will be irreversible.

4. Your Loading Speed Needs An Upgrade

Your website doesn’t have to be down for your reputation and credibility to suffer a significant blow. All you need to cause irreparable damage to your online business is a slow-loading website. Each second of loading time costs you a 4.42% conversion rate. So, it’s best to keep your loading time below the average of 2.5 seconds for desktop and 8.6 seconds for mobile. When it comes to mobile, users are far less patient. If your loading speed is just 1.5 seconds slower, you will suffer a 123% higher bounce rate than a 1-second load speed.

Most importantly, however, in 2024, it’s more evident than ever that people have options; they don’t have time. A recent study showed that 70% of users agree that the website’s loading speed affects their purchasing behavior.

So, if those are not good enough reasons to switch to much faster cloud hosting, we don’t know what is. Keep in mind that with more and more business owners switching to cloud hosting, the averages will soon start dwindling. Soon, you will find your website a way off the acceptable loading time. This will instantly affect your SEO, traffic, conversion rate, and credibility. So, if you’ve noticed your website loading speed falling behind your competitors, it’s time to move on to the 2020s and get cloud hosting.

5. Your Hosting Can Barely Keep Up During Rush Hour

We’ve discussed this problem briefly, but since retail is one of the most prominent online industries, it deserves a separate segment.

Just like with offline shops. There is a particular rush hour when most of your clients visit your website and make their purchases. These timestamps are different based on location, local culture, and the essence of your product. For example, if you offer online lunch orders, it seems reasonable to assume that most of your customers will come in during lunch hours.

Determining when your rush hour is is essential for your marketing strategy and your business’s overall function. It is also important to make sure your server can keep up with the influx during these hours. Traditional servers can slow down loading speeds, cause session delays, and even cause total breakdowns. As you can imagine, your customers won’t be thrilled, and their demeanor will instantly change if their purchase fails due to your server getting overloaded.

Thus, to ensure your website’s infrastructure can withstand rush hour, yet you won’t have to pay a significantly higher price for resources you won’t use 99% of the time, migrating to a cloud hosting infrastructure is the only logical solution.

6. Your Storage Space Is At Its End

Running out of storage space is a major pain point, and cloud hosting can be a lifesaver in this situation. Traditional hosting plans typically come with a fixed amount of storage space. Naturally, this is a huge problem for rapidly growing online businesses whose storage needs grow fast.

For example, an online store can offer a limited number of products, which takes up a fixed storage space. However, due to popular demand, the owner decides to add videos to all products and their usability. That’s a great idea from a marketing perspective, but unfortunately, the traditional hosting limitations won’t allow this. The owner can always go up to a higher tier plan. However, this will be extremely costly, and the website will only use a fraction of the new storage. Moreover, the upgrade will need manual intervention, which will lead to downtime and, in some cases, other complications.

A better solution is to migrate to a cloud hosting service. There these upgrades can be performed on demand without delay or downtime. Furthermore, the entire process will be far more cost-efficient, and complications are far rarer.

So, if your current hosting plan’s storage is running out, you have to make a difficult decision. You can either choose a much more expensive higher tier or the cheaper and easier cloud hosting solution.

7. You Want Better Security

As we explained in length in this article, cybersecurity investments are at an all-time high. This is a natural response to the ever-growing concern for public safety in most countries around the world. Furthermore, in the West, customers are now well aware of the dangers that online shopping hides. Thus, they only trust highly secured websites that can prove their security protocols.

Investing in security is almost mandatory in 2024, and it all starts with securing your website’s infrastructure. In this regard, cloud hosting has a massive advantage over traditional servers. Cloud hosting providers such as HostArmada invest heavily in robust security features and various safeguards. This includes but is not limited to SSL certificates, more frequent backups, DOS and DDoS protection, Malware scanning and removal, and firewalls.

Moreover, the cloud hosting infrastructure allows one to instantly cut out a threatened or attacked server and allocate resources from another. This provides the website with the needed resources even during massive attacks.

The best part is that cloud hosting providers store data across different servers, making data loss practically impossible.

Still, it’s wise to note that securing your website is not entirely within your hosting provider’s scope. It’s a joint effort. While the cloud hosting provider can offer a secure environment for your website, you should still implement additional security measures like strong passwords and user access controls to protect your data further.

So, in 2024, choosing the much more secure cloud hosting option is wise. This way, you won’t lose clients, credibility, and money due to security breaches.

8. You Face Scalability Issues

Scalability issues are, without a doubt, the single biggest reason why you should switch to cloud hosting as soon as possible. Traditional hosting plans always offer fixed resources like storage, processing power, and bandwidth. So, if your website experiences a sudden traffic surge, your server becomes overloaded and crashes.

As you can guess, that’s not something you want to experience, as it will tarnish your reputation, credibility, and conversions and will skyrocket your bounce rate. Most importantly, it will ruin your SEO score and SERP position.

Cloud hosting, on the other hand, is much more flexible. Yes, you still have some limitations, but a good cloud hosting provider will give you a generous buffer before they ask you to move to a higher tier. In other words, if you get a sudden surge of traffic, you will receive the needed resources to accommodate your users. Your server won’t crash. Some hosting providers may penalize you with an additional fee. Others will let it slide if it’s a rare occurrence. Either way, you won’t disappoint your users even if you have to pay a small extra fee for the additional resources.

Moreover, when the time comes to upgrade to a higher tire plan, the migration will be effortless and will not require lengthy manual operation. The cloud hosting service completely eliminates the need for manual intervention, significantly reducing the chances of something going wrong.

Essentially, Cloud hosting allows you to concentrate on your business and your growth rather than strategizing what hosting plan to choose for the next three years. This flexibility allows you a greater margin for mistakes and a better and easier way to scale up or down if needed.

9. You Need Better Performance

Naturally, with the allocation power we discussed until now, cloud hosting services allow your website to shine even brighter. When you have the security that your hosting provider will rise to the challenge when there are sudden surges, you can truly spread your wings in searching for something viral. Naturally, having your website just as responsive and fast while under immense pressure will allow you to retain and even improve your conversion rates.

Furthermore, cloud hosting allows you to choose a server that is closer to your audience. For example, if your primary audience is in Australia, a server in the US will instantly add several hundred milliseconds to your loading time. This may sound insignificant, but users often feel frustrated when each action takes slightly longer.

So, having your website data on local servers will significantly reduce the latency and allow users to surf without any delay. About 70% of them will consider this when choosing whether to purchase from your website or not.

Overall, cloud hosting offers a dynamic and adaptable environment that can optimize your website’s performance. Cloud hosting will give you better stats, a higher SEO score, and better conversion rates through its on-demand resource allocation, global reach, and flexibility.

10. You want more flexibility

Speaking of flexibility, if that’s what you are looking for, you won’t find it in traditional hosting. That’s for sure.

Flexibility is quite important in many industries. For example, in retail, there are several days in a year when you expect an abnormal surge of traffic. For instance, Black Friday. This is one day in the year (or, more accurately, several hours) when your website is expected to go through the roof. If you are using a traditional hosting server, you have strictly limited resources you can use.

Thus, on this special day of the year, when you are bound to make the big bucks, you can be stopped due to the lack of resources in your website’s infrastructure. Still, it is highly irresponsible to go to a higher tier plan just because of this several hours when you expect several times more customers to enter your website. So, you will be limited by how many people you can serve, as your website will become much slower and ultimately crash. That’s detrimental to your business, as you will lose customers on that particular day and deter them from returning anytime.

This is not a problem with cloud hosting, as the entire infrastructure offers greater flexibility. If you expect a significant surge during the holidays or another time (for example, during a promotion), you can even strike a deal with your hosting provider for a limited-time scaling of your resources. Naturally, this will cost you some more, but it will ultimately be far more inexpensive than going for a higher-tier plan for a 3-year period. So, if you operate an e-commerce business and are still stuck on traditional hosting, you are missing out on outstanding opportunities and flexibility, which will make your business model immensely better.

11. You want to go green

Being green is a trend that’s highly unlikely to change in the near future. With the millennials and Gen Z becoming economically active, withholding values similar to theirs has become a highly beneficial strategy. Moreover, going green will enhance your brand’s reputation significantly.

Of course, going green has much more to do with offline practices, but you can always boost your efforts by reducing your carbon footprint from your hosting. Cloud hosting is renowned for being considered significantly greener than traditional hosting. This is due to the efficient use of servers and resources, allowing the downsizing of active servers. In essence, a single physical server acts like multiple virtual servers, each serving a different website or application. This reduces the redundancy in server use and makes the entire process much greener.

So, if you are interested in making your brand greener, start with the easiest and most beneficial solution – switch to cloud hosting.

Some Final Thought

Indeed, changing your hosting plan is always accompanied by carefully considering the benefits and drawbacks. This goes double when you are still in the middle of your contract and prepaid for another year or so. Still, if you are experiencing some or all of the signs we’ve mentioned above, sometimes it’s better to make the jump immediately. Sure, this will make a small dent in your budget, but considering the vast losses you will suffer otherwise, this migration is entirely justified. Especially if you are considering hopping on HostArmada.

Our hosting plans offer unparalleled website loading speed, state-of-the-art security features, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If you are going to make the jump to cloud hosting, you should get the best. So, check out our plans, and if you need help determining which one will best fit your needs, contact our team. They are always happy to help.