How To’s & TutorialsHow does hosting affect your website’s SEO?
This is a question that has been lingering on the minds of a lot of people. It has been asked on several relevant hosting/SEO forums and websites, and everything this question is popped up, what follows is a deep and lengthy discussion involving everyone who has one or two ideas about this subject.
The impact hosting has on your site’s SEO and what you have to do to choose the best hosting for SEO.
A short answer to this is possibly no, as we wouldn’t have been writing this article in the first place if the answer was no. Your struggle for web eminence starts with finding an SEO hosting company and picking a plan, and it doesn’t start with analytics and keywords.
Although a good host is not going to increase your rankings or ensure you have a spot at the top, a bad host can actively spoil your chances at building credit with Google, Bing, and other search engines.
There is 3 web hosting factors and two of them which are uptime/downtime and speed that affect SEO can fluctuate considerably from month to month, and a regular review of them is required.
You should get in touch with your hosting company immediately you notice a problem, and you shouldn’t just assume they know about the problem already because the might not really care even if they are aware of the problem.
Thus, it is would be wise to avoid locking yourself into a long-term web hosting contract.
Now, we will take a detailed look at the 3 web hosting factors that can affect the ranking of your website and which can help you find the best SEO hosting:
Uptime/Downtime
The meaning of Downtime is the total amount of time that your website is inaccessible because of some glitches with its host server. Search engine spiders will perhaps try to visit your site numerous times daily, and if they visit your site during periods of downtime then they record that it is not accessible and move on to the next site.
If this becomes a frequent occurrence, your site will be flagged as undependable and your ranking may drop significantly. Search engines would not want to display sites that are unreliable in their results because it reflects poorly on them if searchers click on a result they provide and then find the site inaccessible.
Even 99% uptime means that your site will be inaccessible for about 7 hours in total over the course of a month. If possible, you would like your website to be accessible 100 percent of the time, though; you can’t avoid some amount of downtime, even on good web hosting plans. Nevertheless, it’s logical to expect a web host to give and to promise – 99.9% uptime, so you shouldn’t agree to anything less.
Speed
Search engines are usually very distracted about the factors that are part of their algorithms, but, in 2010 Google openly said that the speed at which a page load is one of those said factors. It is just one of over 200 factors, and so it certainly has a very insignificant effect, as low as 0.5% on your rankings, but you should still pay attention to it nevertheless. You can check the speed at which your website pages load here:
https://developers.google.com/speed/p...
Although a loading speed that is less than average isn’t automatically the fault of your web host.
The slowdown might be caused by the configuration and coding of your site, but after you have ensured that the technical set-up of your site is well optimized, and your web pages are still loading slowly, then you should ask your web hosting company to move your site to another server.
It is a usual occurrence for a website to be sharing server resources with hundreds of other sites, and the higher the number of the sites on a server, the higher a number of resources used up by the sites, and consequently, the slower your website will load. Loading speed can be significantly improved by moving your site to a less busy server, or even a private/dedicated server.
Location
Additionally to a number of other factors (content, backlinks, etc.), in order for the most germane search results to be displayed, search engines also consider the location of a website when deciding where to place it in their rankings.
For instance, if the person searching is located in the UK, then search engines will usually display UK based sites higher up in their results. To find out the location of your website, they make use of several indicators, such as the IP address of your site.
That IP address is allocated to your site depending on the location of the server on which it is hosted. So, if your host company is based in the UK, then your site will be highly ranked when people in the UK search for your chosen keywords. The other side to that is that your site will rank lower in the search results when people search for those same keywords in other countries.
Nevertheless, your website can still be ranked well in one country if it’s hosted on servers in another country, but it makes it a tad more difficult to do, and it is pointless creating extra work for yourself if it can be avoided.
Hosting services using SSDs
Several people say that web hosting companies who use SSD’s have faster service. For the purpose of those who are not familiar with the dissimilarity, HDD is based on the conventional spinning drive storage method, while SSD operates on a magnetic coating method.
Fundamentally, they are both drives for storing data.
Some don’t use SSDs because:
1. SDDs are a lot more costly.
2. The advancements they offer aren’t really obvious.
3. If the manufacturer brand is not good, they can fail much quicker.
4. You can lose all your data if the drive fails and they are irrecoverable.
5. If you have one large drive with a Linux and Windows partition and one of them gets corrupted, it can also corrupt the other one, and this is so unlike HDDs.
It is a known fact that SSD’s provide a lot more “horsepower” than HDD’s, but, if we put it in layman’s words: “Why should I sell my car that goes 200 mph, and get a new one that’s three times faster, when the standard speed limit wherever I go is not higher than 60 mph?”
Summary:
Selecting a hosting environment is a very vital decision and not one and that should be based on the cheapest solution.
As already explained, it has an effect on everything that your business is trying to achieve online and could have a bad effect on both your site and also your marketing efforts.
And a good news is that there are a lot of options for you if you are in the market for a hosting company, and you have already entered a deal with a bad one, it is high time you moved on to find a better company. In the end, poor hosts are very annoying, and also resource draining SEO drag.
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