5 signs you’re going to need a higher-tier hosting plan

Shopping for a hosting plan isn’t exactly what you’d call fun.

It’s the same as shopping for items like toilet paper and toothpaste – you know you have to do it but there’s no excitement in it.

Choosing between plan tiers can be laborious, too. It’s not like browsing for the right pair of shoes in a shoe shop or the perfect selection of sweets in a confectionary store.

However, getting the right tier is of paramount importance, as choosing the wrong tier can impact your site’s performance.

When shopping for a hosting plan it can be easy to just go for the cheapest plan you can find.

However, if this plan doesn’t have the resources you need, there’s a good chance you’ll be repeating the shopping experience a few months or so down the line.

With this in mind, here are five indicators that you’ll need a higher-tier plan.

1. You’ve got big ambitions for your business

When you’re just setting up your fledgling business, you’ll usually be on a budget.

However, this doesn’t mean you should pick the cheapest web hosting plan you can find.

When picking a plan, think about where you want to be in a year’s time. Consider how your customer base will have grown.

If you’re planning on growing quickly, you’ll need to choose a plan that can accommodate your future visitor numbers.

Look out for plans with generous or unlimited bandwidth. You might be surprised at how reasonable these plans are in terms of price.

Take our WordPress Deluxe plan for example. This features enough bandwidth for up to 100,000 monthly visitors and the price starts at just £5.99 a month.

Or our Deluxe Web Hosting plan – this comes with unlimited flat rate bandwidth and prices start at just £5.99 a month.

2. You need to fill your site with lots of videos and images

Choosing the wrong plan for a site that features a lot of media can lead to slow load times, which can cause potential customers to abandon your site. In a worst-case scenario, choosing a plan with the wrong resources can lead to your site failing to load for visitors altogether.

If you’re planning on launching a site with lots of videos, images and dynamic content, you’re going to need a plan with unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Entry-level plans usually come with caps on both of these types of resources. However, you don’t need to break the bank to get a plan with these essential elements included.

Our Ultimate Web Hosting comes with unlimited SSD storage and unlimited flat rate bandwidth included and prices start at £8.99 a month.

3. You’re planning a big event that will see your site’s visitors temporarily soar

Websites need a decent amount of memory in order to accommodate high traffic levels.

However, the cheapest hosting plans usually put a cap on this key resource.

If you’re planning on running an event like a sale, or you know a social media post is going to go viral, you’ll need your website to be ready to welcome the upcoming attention.

While you may not need the same amount of memory at other times of the year, it can be worth investing in a more powerful plan in the long term to ensure your site doesn’t crash when visitor numbers spike.

4. You’re building an ecommerce store

It goes without saying that ecommerce stores require more resources than single-page websites.

They usually need to accommodate a large number of images and videos and need to include additional functionality like payment solutions, too.

Dedicated ecommerce hosting plans are usually more expensive than second and even third-tier hosting plans.

However, they are priced this way for a reason – they have been designed to feature the resources ecommerce sites need.

At tsoHost, our WordPress Ecommerce plan is £24.99 a month. However, it comes with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Plus, the plan gives you access to £4,000 of premium WooCommerce plugins that allow you to tailor your site in more than 70 different ways.

5. You need hosting for multiple websites

It may come as a pleasant surprise to discover that hosting for multiple sites doesn’t have to bite into your bottom line that much.

Our Maximum Web Hosting plan, for example, allows you to run up to 200 websites.

At tsoHost, we also offer a range of plans that are deliberately designed for professionals who need to run multiple sites.

Called Web Hosting Plus, these plans let you build unlimited websites and offer 8GB of memory, 4 CPUs and unmetered flat rate bandwidth.

Find out more about everything these plans feature, on our Web Hosting Plus page.

Still not sure about forking out a bit more for a higher tier plan?

If you’re still nervous about paying out for a higher tier plan right away, ensure your hosting plan makes it easy to upgrade.

At tsoHost, for example, you can upgrade your Web Hosting plan in a single click and there’s no admin fee for upgrading.