How often should I re-evaluate my hosting?

Re-evaluate the hosting decision every 18-24 months, or whenever one of these trigger events fires:

• Annual renewal with a price hike >15%. Time to negotiate or shop.
• You’ve crossed a GMV threshold. $200k/mo, $1M/mo, $5M/mo are the natural inflection points where the previous tier stops making sense.
• You’ve migrated to Hyvä, ~22% compute saving means you can downsize or move to a cheaper provider.
• Performance has regressed, LCP > 3s, INP > 200ms, or 5xx error rate > 0.5% sustained. Sometimes a hosting move fixes it; sometimes it’s code, not infra.
• You’ve moved to / from Adobe Commerce licence. Adobe Cloud only makes sense on the licence; moving off means you’re paying for unused features.
• Major version upgrade (2.4.x → next major). Treat the upgrade as a hosting-review trigger because tuning changes anyway.
• Multi-region requirement appears. If you suddenly need EU data residency or APAC latency, your single-region host may not cut it.

What “re-evaluate” means:

1. Re-run this calculator with current traffic + GMV. See if the recommended provider has changed.
2. Get 1-2 informal quotes from the calculator-recommended providers. Don’t spend more than a week.
3. Stack the all-in cost (hosting + ops + tooling + opportunity cost of migration) against staying.
4. Migration cost ~$5k, $25k means the saving has to clear $500, $2k/mo for 12+ months to be worth it.

Don’t re-evaluate more than every 12 months, migrating hosting is a 4-8 week project, and constant shopping is a tax on your engineering team. Lock in 24-month contracts when you find a fit.