You’ve built your website or platform. It is a fantastic piece of software, it works — and even better, your customers love it. You’re done developing, so now you can fire all your developers and not renew your contractor agreements. Right?
Not so fast. What happens when your marketing goes viral, causing your daily visitors to go way up and user accounts to explode? Software engineers are constantly working to solve new problems, because the software that works just fine with 10,000 users a day often won’t scale and function the same with a million. Even if it does, you will usually need to expand your hardware footprint, which often requires entirely new code.
Software updates are essential for security, but that’s only part of what makes them important.
Avoid Throwing Hardware at Bad Code
It can be cost-prohibitive to rebuild or maintain your codebase, but it can be equally cost-prohibitive to continue adding more and more servers to solve a problem caused by inefficient, unscalable code. Plus, hardware costs are fixed and will continue forever if you let them. Why not spend that budget on building better code, which will also make your business more valuable?
Innovation can be an excellent way to make or save money. Look at the explosion of creator platforms requiring large-scale hosting and bandwidth. They’ve changed how porn and mainstream content are consumed and subscribed to. Likewise, building better code starts by doing things differently.
For example, one of my clients got tired of scaling servers, engineered a way to reduce the many boxes they needed, and lowered their hosting costs by 80%. How did they accomplish this remarkable feat? They rebuilt their codebase in a newer, more advanced language than standard PHP, which is used on approximately 77% of all websites, according to a 2023 W3Techs survey.
Keep Up With Software Updates
Software updates are essential for security, but that’s only part of what makes them important. Running on old software hurts companies in other ways, especially essential core software like PHP or MySQL. Not only are those companies missing out on upgrades that might make systems run faster and more efficiently, but they might also be spending more money on hosting than they need to. I’m shooting myself in the foot a bit here, but ensuring that servers are running the newest software could mean you need less hosting resources, which saves you money.
WordPress is so widely used that it powers approximately 43% of websites, according to W3Techs. But did you know that only 50.6% of WordPress sites are running supported versions of PHP, meaning version 5.6 or above? Being that popular brings the distinction of being one of the most hacked applications as well. Setting aside the obvious security benefits, the WordPress performance gains from upgrading your version of PHP are staggering. Benchmark tests between PHP 7.2 and 8.1 showed 35% more requests fulfilled per second — 106.56 requests per second versus 163.43 requests per second, respectively. If you are running four servers, you could drop one server and still have gains. Imagine your hosting bill 35% lower.
Avoid Burning Rings of Fire
Another consequence of not keeping your codebase up to date: when a critical third-party software update is required, you may suddenly need to upgrade through multiple versions, which may introduce bugs or incompatibilities to your website. Racing to rebuild sections of your code, remove or replace deprecated functions and retest to ensure compatibility is not a great way to do software engineering, and can lead to costly mistakes. Far better to keep up with versions and ensure your code is up to date than wait until it’s too degraded.
While some hosting companies will support older software almost indefinitely — you’d be surprised by the “vintage” software some of our clients use — big cloud corporations like AWS force-upgrade their instances on a schedule. I’ve been contacted by a few panicked website publishers who received dreadful notices that their servers are being upgraded with a looming deadline. Sometimes the only alternative is migrating from your current hosting company in a hasty manner. That can get messy too, so best to avoid it.
Business moves fast. Regardless of where you are hosted, continual investment in your tech stack is crucial for making sure your website is ready for whatever the future may bring. It will be more efficient, with better processing times and faster page loads. It will be compatible with other applications, meaning easier integrations and new features to take advantage of. Give it a go, and chances are you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
Brad Mitchell is the founder of MojoHost, which has served the industry for nearly two decades and has been named XBIZ Web Host of the Year several times. He regularly shares insights as a panelist at trade shows. Contact brad@mojohost.com to learn more about the suite of services his company offers.
