Most business websites start on shared hosting, and that’s a sensible choice. The question is knowing when it stops being enough.

What shared hosting is

Your site lives on a server alongside hundreds of others, all drawing from the same memory and processor. It’s affordable and low-maintenance. The trade-off is that a busy neighbour can slow you down, and you have limited control over the server.

What a VPS changes

A virtual private server gives you a guaranteed slice of resources. Your site’s speed no longer depends on anyone else’s traffic, and you can tune the server for your workload.

Signs you’ve outgrown shared hosting

• Pages regularly take more than three seconds to load, even after caching and image optimisation
• Your host warns you about resource limits or suspends the account during traffic spikes
• You run an online store or booking system where slow checkout loses sales
• You host several sites and need them isolated from each other

What to ask any host

How often are backups taken, and how fast can they restore one? Where are the servers, and is there a CDN for visitors in East Africa? Can you reach a person by phone when the site is down? The last answer matters more than any spec sheet.

If you’re unsure where your site sits, send us the address and we’ll tell you honestly whether an upgrade is worth it.