Whenever a new entrepreneur or a startup decides to create a mobile app, immediately they start thinking about the hosting server of the App before even finalizing the features and contents of it. It has to be accepted that the hosting server for a Mobile App is important but at the same time, we need to understand that the nature and audience of the App plays a major role in identifying the hosting.
Mobile Apps are volatile in nature, they are downloaded less, retained rarely and engaged scarcely. Any new app that gets developed will take time to settle down in terms of features and stability, after which downloads will increase gradually. Then comes the app retention and maintaining a healthy retention rate needs significant attention. Unless advertised heavily any new app will take its time to receive downloads.
Because of the above factors most of the apps are built as MVP with essential features alone to test the market. That being the case the app would not be requiring huge computing power, storage and bandwidth initially. Nowadays all shared hosting plans provided by major companies are powerful in terms of server ability. Such plans will have a good amount of storage, reasonable bandwidth, database and security at a minimal cost. So the basic hosting plan of any reputed provider will be more than sufficient for a mobile app during the evaluation period.
Once the app reaches the sizeable amount of downloads with good user retention and engagement the app owner may consider moving the app to VPS provided by companies, because VPS comes with more amount of power, storage and bandwidth. That will result in better user experience for the app users and better control for the app developers. Since the app engagement by users increases investing in a VPS would be a right decision for an app owner.
Dedicated servers can be used after the app reaches atleast a million downloads and boasts of a huge number of daily active users. At this juncture, the app would have started earning good amount of revenue thus supporting the expenses of dedicated servers and its overhead costs.The speed and efficiency of the app will be definitely far better with a dedicated server and that would delight the users greatly.
After the app requirement for resources exceeds the dedicated server capabilities, scalable cloud hosting should be considered for hosting and thorough analysis need to be performed for identifying the provider with excellent infrastructure, reasonable support and affordable cost. This kind of step by step approach would help the app owner focus towards the app features and promotions and keep his costs lesser until the app starts supporting itself.
We are experts in Mobile app development, hosting and support, please contact us for any mobile app related consulting activities and we would be happy to engage.