10 Common Hosting Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Save time, money, and stress by dodging these avoidable pitfalls.
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Save time, money, and stress by dodging these avoidable pitfalls.
New sites often overbuy resources or underbuy reliability. Start with quality shared hosting, then move to VPS as traffic, CPU, or memory demands grow. Watch access logs and resource graphs, not just “how it feels.”
Provider snapshots are useful but not enough. Keep daily offsite backups (files + database) with multiple restore points (7/14/30 days). Test a full restore quarterly.
Modern browsers and users expect HTTPS everywhere. Install SSL, force HTTPS with 301 redirects, and when stable, enable HSTS so browsers stick to HTTPS.
If you send from your domain, set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Use a reputable SMTP service for bulk or transactional email to protect deliverability.
Use a reliable DNS provider, keep TTLs sensible (300–3600s), and avoid duplicate or conflicting records. Document what each record does and prune old entries regularly.
Too many plugins, oversized images, heavy JS, and unoptimized queries ruin speed and Core Web Vitals. Compress images, enable server compression (Brotli/GZIP), cache static assets, and remove unused code.
Outdated cores, themes, and plugins are attack vectors. Schedule maintenance windows, update in staging, then deploy to production with a rollback plan.
Set uptime alerts, error logging, and resource monitoring. Track slow queries and 500/404 spikes. Early detection prevents long outages and SEO damage.
Traffic spikes happen. Have a plan to add CPU/RAM, scale to VPS, and use a CDN. Split concerns (web, DB, cache) as you grow so one layer doesn’t bottleneck the entire stack.
Related: Website Security Checklist · Speed Optimization · How DNS Works