Key Takeaways
- 61% of hyper-growth businesses (HGBs) reported experiencing hosting and server problems in the past year, with crashes and slowdowns among the top issues.
- Another 58% reported that they had to upgrade their hosting to keep up with scaling demands, which signals that many plans aren’t built for rapid growth.
- The bright side is that hosts that position themselves as growth partners rather than simply vendors will win — and keep — those high-value customers.
A Liquid Web report found that 61% of surveyed hyper-growth businesses (HGBs) say they have experienced hosting and server issues in the past year. Topping the list of challenges HGBs reported were server crashes (48%) and slow performance (34%).
HGBs scale quickly — so if hosting providers can’t support sustained, aggressive growth with scalable infrastructure, they’ll risk losing what could have become a long-term client.
Sachin Puri, former Liquid Web CGO and current Bluehost CEO, emphasized HGBs don’t just need hosting; they need a foundation that allows them to scale as much as they’ll possibly need.
“Our research proves that the right hosting strategy isn’t just about uptime; it’s about driving revenue, maximizing performance, strengthening security, and sustaining long-term success,” he said.
The Liquid Web report surveyed more than 100 HGBs, which are companies that are growing with a CAGR of 40% or higher.
What the Data Reveals
From the most-reported issues to the least, here’s what HGBs have been seeing the past 12 months:
- Server crashes: 48%
- Slow performance: 34%
- Resource overuse: 30%
- Load balancing and traffic distribution: 21%
- Increased costs due to scaling infrastructure: 19%
- Data loss or corruption: 19%
- Difficulty with backups and recovery: 18%
- Lack of customer support or slow response times: 17%
- Security vulnerabilities or breaches: 16%
- Limited scalability: 16%
While only 16% of HGBs say they struggle with scalability, a closer look at the rest of the findings suggests a bigger problem: Most businesses have a perception gap of what scalability truly is.
Businesses define downtime as a temporary outage; latency as things being slower than usual; and server overload as a traffic spike. But to hosts, these are clear signs of overused infrastructure.
New clients have goals but often don’t know how to reach them, especially with complex hosting setups.
Hosts should remember that they act as translators, and it’s up to them to act as growth partners and explain what’s going wrong, why, and how they’re fixing it.
Supporting Hyper-Growth Customers
The white paper also found that 58% of HGBs had to upgrade their hosting in the past year, which implies that standard off-the-shelf solutions aren’t doing enough anymore.
So if a web host is still branding with simple claims like “fast and flexible” or “99.98% uptime guarantee,” they’ll be the ones who see churn the most.
It’s as Puri said: “Investing in high-performance infrastructure is no longer optional — it’s the competitive edge that today’s leaders are leveraging to dominate the digital landscape.”
Because while HGBs are high value, they’re also high risk. If you can’t grow with them, they’ll leave.
