Going from having a couple of customer websites managed to a multitude of them is a great milestone for expanding digital agencies. However, it uncovers an infrastructure drawback – that is, shared hosting.
Even though this hosting can be a great choice for launching a single brick and mortar business, shared hosting creates many risks for a digital agency when trying to address client retention, security, and performance concerns.
The moment one website running on shared hosting experiences a lot of traffic or a breach in its security, every other website running on that host will suffer from this problem as well.
That is why modern agencies choose to change their digital strategy and avoid such problems. They transition their client portfolio to cPanel VPS hosting.
Performance Issue of Shared Hosting
A shared hosting environment is where the server resources, including CPU, RAM, and bandwidth, are shared by several websites. This is a noisy neighbor scenario where, in case the script running another agency’s client website hosted on the same server is poorly written or has a sudden traffic increase, all of the agency’s clients’ websites might slow down or fail to work.
In addition to that, slow website performance is directly threatening client relationship for any agency. Nowadays, people expect to open web pages within two seconds. Slow loading of pages reduces conversion rate, and it is one of the factors influencing the search engine rating algorithm.
Switching to VPS hosting will guarantee your clients will have their dedicated slices of server resources. With virtualization technology, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) creates guaranteed slices of CPU cores and memory, which belong only to your instance. Regardless of what happens with neighboring virtual servers, the performance of your clients’ sites will not be affected.
cPanel and WHM Simplification of Management Processes
Managing a few separate hosting accounts is an extremely difficult process. One of the reasons why digital agencies prefer cPanel VPS configurations is the additional tool, namely WebHost Manager (WHM), which comes with individual cPanel accounts.
With WHM, agencies gain the ability to manage the whole server in the following way:
- Create Isolated Accounts: create cPanel account for each client separately, and clients won’t be able to access anyone else’s data.
- Allocate Resources: allocate the amount of disk space, bandwidth, and email accounts, depending on how much does a particular client pay for them.
- Configure Automated Backup: configure backup to the cloud-based external storage.
Thanks to this architecture, managing daily routine becomes much easier. In case a client needs some changes to be made, like database optimization, renewing SSL certificate, or creating staging environment, an agency developer needs to use only one panel instead of logging into dozens of different ones.
Boosting Security and Client Isolation
One of the crucial components of digital authority is security. In a situation where websites are stored on the same local directory in a shared hosting arrangement, one vulnerable site opens a possibility of cross-infections with malware that can infect other websites hosted there as well.
It is unacceptable for agencies that manage e-commerce shops and corporate websites containing sensitive information.
Environment isolation prevents cross-infection using cPanel VPS. Every VPS runs inside an independent secured environment. Additionally, because agencies have root access or administrative level access in a VPS, they will be able to configure server-wide security measures that cannot be configured by a shared host including:
- Custom firewall configurations (such as ConfigServer Security & Firewall)
- ModSecurity configuration per web application needs
- Custom SSH ports to protect against automated attacks
Leveraging Infrastructure as a Business Tool
In addition to performance gains and enhanced security, a migration to a cPanel VPS opens a new business avenue for agencies, white label reselling.
If an agency uses shared hosting accounts for hosting client websites, then all money earned from hosting services are paid to a third party. With a powerful VPS solution, an agency can purchase server resources and offer them as managed premium hosting to their clients.
As the agency takes care of maintenance and management of server resources, they can earn a recurring monthly premium.
Conclusion
Transitioning from the shared environment into the dedicated one seems like an obvious choice for all those agencies that need sustainable development and satisfied customers.
Transitioning to the cPanel VPS means that the agencies would be able to have all the necessary resources that would help them work with modern web resources. In the end, this transition would mean that agencies would no longer be slaves to servers, but would provide fast performance for customers.
