Reliable hosting performance is critical for high-volume-traffic WordPress websites. You need a hosting service that can auto-scale hosting resources during peak times without downtime.
This lets your website handle sudden traffic spikes without crashing, becoming unresponsive, or slowing down.
While several hosting options exist, scalable cloud hosting is your best bet.
But there’s a big problem.
With many scalable WordPress hosting providers, which one is right for you?
In this article, I will walk you through the basics of scalable WordPress hosting services and what to look for. I will also recommend the best web hosts for scalable hosting plans.
What is Scalable Website Hosting?
Scalable website hosting provides automatic, on-demand server resources that adapt to your website’s changes, traffic, and growth.
Your web host provides a plan or service that grows with your website’s needs. It automatically adjusts hosting resources (CPU, RAM, Bandwidth, security features, etc.) based on your website’s current demand.
Here is a simple analogy to help you understand scalable hosting.
Imagine your website traffic and security needs as water flows through a series of pipelines.
As traffic and security needs trickle or surge through the pipes, the pipeline automatically narrows or expands to let them flow through without hindrance. The pipes adjust their diameter based on water flow and security requirements.
This hosting technology and these services allow large enterprise businesses to focus on running their business instead of managing or monitoring servers.
5 Signs You Need to Move to a Scalable Hosting Plan
As your WordPress website grows and attracts more visitors, it may struggle to maintain 99.99% availability, speed, and optimal performance.
This is where scaling comes in – adjusting your website’s resources to handle increased demand and maintain optimal performance.
Here are some critical situations that indicate your WordPress site might be ready for scaling:
- Anticipated Traffic Surge – Do you have a marketing campaign coming up, or are you expecting a seasonal rush? Proactive scaling ensures your website can handle the influx of visitors without crashing or slowing down. Imagine a store preparing for a sale – they wouldn’t wait until the lines are out the door to increase staff. Similarly, scaling your website ahead of time prevents a negative user experience during peak traffic.
- Slow Loading Times – If your website takes a noticeable amount of time to load for visitors, it’s a red flag. Slow loading times can frustrate users, hurt your search engine ranking (SEO), and ultimately, cost you conversions. Scaling can address this by giving your website more resources, like increased processing power and memory, so it can handle more requests efficiently.
- Frequent Crashes and Downtime – Website crashes and downtime are inconvenient for visitors, can damage your reputation, and can lead to lost sales and revenue. If your site experiences these issues regularly, it’s likely struggling to cope with the current workload. Scaling provides the necessary stability and resources to keep your website running smoothly, even during unexpected traffic spikes.
- Going Global – If you’re expanding your reach to a global audience, factors like geographical distance can affect website performance. Scaling can help mitigate this by allowing you to distribute your website’s content across geographically dispersed servers. This ensures faster load times for visitors worldwide.
- Hosting Feature Demand – As your website grows and increases traffic, you might add new features or functionalities like eCommerce, user forums, or video streaming services. These features can put additional strain on your website’s resources. Scaling allows you to accommodate this growth and ensure your website can handle the increased demands of these new features without compromising performance.
Bear in mind that while some of these signs might point to poor hosting service, they don’t necessarily mean your current web host is mediocre.
Your website may have outgrown its hosting package and require more computing power.
Either way, if you’re experiencing more of these issues, you should rethink your hosting and see whether moving to a scalable plan will help.
How to Choose The Right Scalable Web Host
Several key features matter when choosing the right scalable hosting plan.
These features help you choose the best scalable WordPress hosting, monitor traffic spikes and performance, and proactively adjust resources when needed.
It also helps keep your WordPress website available and running smoothly during heavy traffic spikes.
Vertical or Horizontal Scaling
There are two types of scaling in web hosting: vertical and horizontal.
Vertical scaling requires adding more resources to your existing server to handle on-demand resource usage, making it more powerful and optimized.
Horizontal scaling means adding more servers to your infrastructure to increase computing power and distribute the workload across multiple servers. It could include creating a cluster of servers that share the processing load.
Both options have their benefits and disadvantages.
Most websites will require vertical scaling. Implementing it is simpler and faster because you work with existing server infrastructure.
Research web hosts with vertical scaling capabilities and features that let you implement it with one click. This lets you manage high traffic effortlessly.
Web hosts like Cloudways provide vertical scaling on all of their hosting plans. This lets you, as a small business owner, adjust server size as needed.
Bot Traffic Protection
According to a 2023 report by Imperva, 49.6% of internet traffic comes from bots.
Hackers may also send malicious bot traffic to your website to gain unauthorized access to your administrative area.
This could lead to severe issues, such as high hosting resource usage, losing control over your website, virus infection, etc.
Consider a web host that offers efficient protection against bot traffic. This will ensure only legitimate traffic requests are made to your hosting server. This thereby protects against bot traffic and helps guard against potential website security vulnerabilities.
Global CDN
CDN is critical to website performance, content delivery, and improving user experience.
It is also important for businesses with a global reach and audience. CDN will save server resources by serving user requests from the closest data center to the user instead of your website’s origin server.
This improves server resource usage and helps scale your website.
WP Engine and Cloudways use Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN). A cloud-based CDN service that uses advanced technology to offer security and performance features like DDoS protection, WAF (Web Application Firewall), image optimization, page edge caching, SSL certificates, and hosting scalability features like CDN.
Advanced Cache Mechanism
A cache is a crucial component of high-performance WordPress websites, enabling them to use fewer resources while improving performance.
You need a web host that offers server-level and application-side caching mechanisms. This is recommended for optimal website and server performance.
In addition to Varnish, your web host should provide an Object cache, such as Redis or Object Cache Pro. These are essential cache functions for high-traffic websites.
In addition, Memcached, which caches reference data and objects such as images, database queries, and APIs, is also necessary to cache objects in RAM and enhance performance for database-driven websites.
If you host with Cloudways, these services run efficiently on your server. You can also control the core services that run on your server in your Cloudways account.
Pricing Structure
Price structure is another significant factor when choosing the best scalable WordPress hosting.
A scalable hosting service should mainly be based on a pay-as-you-go model. Or, in the best-case scenario, a fixed extra charge for additional resources the website uses.
This could be on top of the standard monthly hosting bills. The thing is, additional server resource usage pricing should be clearly explained in writing and be simple for a beginner to understand.
If you review the Cloudways pricing structure, it clearly states the hourly cost of additional resource usage.
Note that this example is for the DigitalOcean cloud server.
Type of Website
Websites vary widely in resource demands and hosting needs.
For example, a large eCommerce website might require more server resources, hosting features, and optimal performance than a service business, even if they drive the same amount of web traffic.
E-commerce stores are more likely to operate resource-intensive website functions than publishing and business service websites.
Therefore, consider your hosting-specific needs and resources, including CPU, RAM, Bandwidth, website features, software, and more.
Support
Customer support is a key factor when choosing the right scalable WordPress web host. You don’t want to be left on your own when you need help from your host’s support.
Reliable and supportive customer support is crucial for troubleshooting scaling issues when needed. So, choose a web host that prioritizes customer experience and has multiple support channels – live chat, email, tickets, phone calls, social media, etc.
This ensures you can reach them 24/7 through several channels in an emergency.
Another thing to consider is that some web hosts offer different tiers of customer support.
Ask and understand what support is available for your hosting plan and services.
For example, Cloudways has three different customer support services – Standard, Advanced, and Premium support – depending on your level of account.
Standard support is free and available to all users. Advanced and Premium include additional charges, add-ons, and varying access levels to the Cloudways support team.
You can check the Cloudways support page for more information.
Editor’s Pick – Best Scalable WordPress Hosting
Over the past decade, I have been involved in blogging and online business, and I have used many web hosts. Some web hosts suit small blogs with minimal traffic and a low budget.
But for businesses that drive significant traffic and growth, you need a more robust, innovative web host to handle server workloads without sacrificing performance or uptime.
Based on personal experience, Cloudways and WP Engine are web hosts built for high-traffic businesses.
Their server infrastructures are built to handle millions of visitors, with enterprise-grade web security features and innovative hosting tools that help you work less while doing more.
Cloudways offers fully managed WordPress hosting with an auto-scaling server feature. It automatically scales server resources in real time to accommodate your website traffic needs.
WP Engine’s autoscale feature automatically scales up server resources during high traffic and scales down when traffic returns to normal. This ensures you don’t overpay for unused resources.
Whether your website suddenly experiences 10,000 or millions of hits, WP Engine autoscale handles the load efficiently.
Cloudways and WP Engine partner with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, bringing the power of cloud hosting to every business at affordable pricing. Your website will benefit from first-in-class cloud infrastructure powered by two of the best in the industry.
