It’s probably one of the biggest migrations a website owner can make, possibly apart from moving from Blogger to WordPress: changing from a shared host to a dedicated host. It’s something that every website should, and really need to, do as their traffic starts to gain serious numbers. However, it is a huge change to make and one that many people simply don’t want to risk. With this, I have just changed one of my websites about poetry analysis from a shared host to a dedicated server with GoDaddy. Here are my first thoughts, looking at being a week into the migration.
Website Feels Quicker
The main reason to go to dedicated hosting is for the site performance improvements that come with it. With shared hosting, the server load is shared between many websites, which will have varying amounts of traffic. If the server cannot handle it, your website could be moved to another host, so it never really has a solid home, with resources being juggled around.
With dedicated hosting, you own the server, so only you use the resources. I found that my pageviews/visit has increased from 1.5 to 1.8 overnight, whilst the time to download the page has also reduced. By itself, this is enough incentive for me to justify the extra price. Better user experience is every owner’s goal.
More Control
I love the fact you have complete control over everything – all the files, servers, caching, absolutely everything. Part of my problems with shared hosting was that GoDaddy had inbuilt caching on server level, which caused issues with site speed and other plugins on my WordPress websites. With dedicated servers, there’s none of this – you have to do it yourself! This means I can choose what I want for caching, so have opted for WP Rocket.
Caching is a Bigger Deal than I ever thought!
Along with more control, there is also much more transparency with all of the statistics of the server too. What I love is that you can see the load and memory used for important server elements such as:
- CPU usage
- System disk usage
- Physical memory usage
- Disk usage
- File usage
It was actually due to this transparency that I realized how much of a deal caching has to website servers and performance of a website! Due to GoDaddy shared hosting having caching inbuilt, my websites did not have any caching. Migrating them to dedicated hosting meant that they now had no caching whatsoever. This really caused issues with CPU usage:
Once caching had been installed, CPU usage went down considerably, because the ‘calculations’ by the CPU had already been performed and stored as a cached file:
Ultimately, I would advise people to go with dedicated server hosting. Although there are many companies out there with super fast shared WordPress hosting, they will never be able to truly give the same transparency of stats and control that dedicated hosting can provide.
