July 29

0 comments

When is it time to switch to a new host for WordPress sites?

By Christopher G Mendla

July 29, 2021


Last Updated on July 29, 2021 by Christopher G Mendla

The quality of a hosting company does not always remain constant. At some point, you may find that it is time to move to a new hosting company.

Overview – Shared hosting to incubate a few small sites.

I have four WordPress blogs that were lucrative a few years back. I would make a couple of hundred dollars per month. It wasn’t earth shattering but the sites were growing. Some issues caused be to put the sites on the back burner. After about 2 or 3 years, the income dropped to almost zero.

I decided to see if I could revive the sites. Most of the content is evergreen so it was worth a shot. I stayed with the hosting company that had previously served me well. When the sites were in full swing, the hosting was fast and reliable. Tech support was 24/7 phone, chat or ticket with US based support.

I started reviving the sites at the beginning of 2019 putting in an hour or two each week with some surges in between. By May of 2020 traffic and revenue started to show a noticeable increase.

Throttling and crashing

As I added content and did some social media marketing, traffic and revenue began to steadily increase but it was still lower than I expected. I’ve had mixed results with ‘site speed indicators’. The sites were showing OK on the desktop but not on mobile.

I decided to put a little more time into the sites.

About nine months ago or around December of 2020, I began to notice issues. After taking a good look at my plugins, I decided to remove the similar posts plugin. There were posts saying that any similar posts function used a lot of resources. I looked into a cloud based tool to show similar posts but decided it wasn’t worth it in terms of time to configure and costs. Removing similar posts brought the performance of the hosting to a fairly reasonable level.

About three months ago, around May of 2021, I began to experience more problems that were a lot more severe when working in the back end. Some examples of normal tasks that caused a crashes were:

  • Trying to update more than one plugin at a time.
  • Writing a post, even a small post.
  • Modifying an existing post
  • Working with widgets

The problem was that the hosting company was throttling I/O processes, CPU, Entry Processes, Physical Memory and more. When the limits were reached, the front and back ends of ALL SITES IN MY PLAN would be unavailable with a ‘resources exceeded’ message. I had to contact tech support through chat or a ticket to get them to kill the processes for the offending site. I finally found that I could temporarily kill the site myself.

The reality was that the more frustrating working with the sites became, the less I wanted to work with them.

Below is an example of Physical Memory Usage reaching it’s limit of 1GB. If I didn’t catch the fact that the resources were exceeded, all of my sites would be unavailable to all visitors. The drop in the graph was when I killed the processes. That usually resulted in lost work and a need to start over.

No you can not move one of your sites to another plan

I tried to move one of my sites with the old host to another plan. Their support said I couldn’t do that because it was already on their plan. That didn’t make any sense. I tried again and got the same result. At that point I decided to move to a new hosting company. I didn’t make the decision lightly as I was aware of the work required.

Cost benefit analysis of switching hosts

There is a cost to moving to another host and there is a cost of staying with your existing host and plan. In my case, it was getting to the point where I could no longer work with the sites and suspected I was losing traffic due to the sites being unavailable due to resource limitations.

My choice was to either switch hosting companies or abandon the websites altogher.

Choosing a new host.

I did some research regarding the leading hosting companies. I settled on BlueHost because it was rated highly in a number of places. I figured I’d migrate one site to see how it went.

.

Considerations

  • I ruled out a VPS (Virtual Private Server).
  • Keeping up with security on a server would result in a lot of unprofitable time spent. With shared hosting I would be able to get services such as Cloudflare and maybe an SSL. I have installed SSLs a number of times. It isn’t difficult but it does require time and attention
  • The sites were low traffic with a maximum of about 2000 visitors per month. I was averaging about 5 to 10 comments per week. In other words, I could afford perhaps 24 hours of downtime and perhaps losing one or two comments.
  • The sites were large. Three of them are image intensive. Two are location/history sites and the third is a general blog with things such as do-it-yourself projects. The fourth site is this one which is a little less image intensive. However, the backups of the sites were over 1GB which seemed to preclude an automatic migration by the hosting company. That was not a problem as I was able to do the migrations manually.
  • I take weekly backups using Softaculous on CPanel. In other words, I had a good depth of backups.
  • If the migration failed, my fallback plan was to simply repoint the DNS Servers back to the original host and regroup.
  • Cost – I wanted to keep the cost reasonable. I opted for $80 for the first year. The price will go up after that. I could have purchased three years at the intro price but became a bit cheap.

Making the move

I’ve migrated three of the four revenue sites so far. I plan on moving the fourth this weekend.

Each move took a couple of hours of effort. The support at BlueHost has been fantastic so far. I primarily use the chat and at times the phone support. All of my questions have been resolved quickly.

Once the revenue generating sites are moved over, I have a few other sites to migrate. At that point, I will terminate my old hosting plan which was about $50/quarter.

Results

So far, I am very happy with the results. I can work in the back end without crashing my hosting. The rep assured me that they do not throttle resources the way the previous host did. I realize that could change but for now, things are good.

It has only been a week but I believe I’m seeing an increase in traffic and revenue. It will take a month or two to know for sure.

I’m already finding that I’m writing more content and tweaking the sites more. More importantly, I’m not hesitating to do plugin updates which enhances the security.

Christopher G Mendla

About the author

A web developer living in Southampton, PA

Self motivated critical thinker and problem solver providing technology consulting services.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}