Many people, when starting a new business, usually think of and plan for the long term when first starting out. How will the business model scale when things get busy? Will we be able to support fast growth with our current processes in place? These are things that are typically always addressed right away. Unfortunately, many people don’t think or consider these things about their website and their online portion of their business. Here are a few things you need to ask yourself when building a new website or expanding your online business.

What will happen if I receive 100x my traffic tomorrow?

What processes are in place that will allow your website to support 100 times the traffic you are currently getting? What is your current hosting solution and how quickly are you able to increase resources if required. If you are running on a shared web hosting package and you expect your website to grow, consider upgrading before it’s inconvenient or too late.

Unfortunately, many web hosts out there will shut your shared hosting service down if you use up too many resources on the shared server. There are a couple solutions to thins, one being a dedicated server hosting option, and the other, VPS hosting.

Dedicated server hosting has been around for a while, where you are hosting on a separate server without anyone else. However, this usually means that you are paying for resources that you do not need for a lot of the time. Virtual servers on the other hand allow you to easily and quickly scale up and add resources to your container as you need them. Starting with a low end VPS and scaling up as necessary may be the best solution for someone planning to grow their website.

What happens if your website gets hacked tomorrow?

Are you future proofing your website against unforeseen circumstances? What happens if your website gets hacked and you lose everything? Does your business suffer? What if your email didn’t work for a week, do you know what you would do? These are things you need to consider when building out a website.

Make sure you always have an up to date backup. Although all web hosts do backups of their servers, these backups are mainly for emergencies in case the entire server is compromised, and many times you do not have access to the individual files. Make sure you have a backup system in place where you can easily and quickly restore any compromised files when necessary.

What happens when you change your prices or make changes to your business?

Does your website allow you easily make changes without having to spend any money? If your website is not already running on one of the more popular content management systems, such as WordPress you should consider making the switch before you need to. Having access to edit and manage your website easily can save you a lot of time and money down the road.

These are only a few things to consider when future-proofing your website. If your website or email is business crucial, make sure you are doing whatever possible to allow it to last well into the future.