How Does Your Web Host Affect SEO?

Every website needs a web host provider to be available to users. See how the web host you choose affects SEO metrics and rankings for your site.

When thinking of SEO measures and planning optimization jobs, business leads and marketing professionals frequently concentrate on website text contents, images, keywords, and ranking metrics. However, no matter if their websites contain medical school essay samples and other academic papers, or they are busy with promoting services, all of them will pay attention to one thing that’s not too obvious: their site’s web host.

It seems negligible regarding the entire mass of factors and complex measures required to optimize one’s website for search engines. Nevertheless, they say that the devil is in detail. When speaking of SEO, that phrase suits best.

So, here below are the main points of impact that your web host can have on your website’s SEO metrics and search positioning. Check them out attentively, and don’t forget that it is enough to invest enough time and effort to optimize, for instance, a page with free essay samples on economics once excellently, and then it will bring you stable profits and leads for months and even years.

So, here are the main SEO impact factors that depend on your web host.

Website Uptime

Uptime is the main host parameter that may affect the SEO of your website. It is the correlation between the website’s staying online and offline. The best uptime percentage for your resource is 100%.

Obviously, it is impossible to keep it online all the time. However, you should do everything you can to make your uptime as close to 100% as possible. The 99% uptime indicator means that your resource is not functioning for 1 minute out of 100. Tech experts say that the best uptime number is 99.9%.

The trouble is simple and obvious, but it is critical. In case the search bot visits your website when it is offline, your resource won’t be indexed. Additionally, the next visit of the search robot will be postponed. In case that situation occurs too frequently, your website may lose its position.

Page Load Speed

The loading speed is among the main Google ranking factors. The faster your site’s pages can be uploaded and displayed on the visitor’s screen, the better it is for users and your SEO levels.

You can optimize the load speed of your pages and the entire website by compressing images, optimizing scripts, fonts, and styles. However, the performance of your hosting server matters a lot here as well. For your information, Google recommends getting a page load speed at 200 ms or faster.

See Also: 6 Best Web Hosting For Small Businesses, Bluehost Web Hosting Review

Your IP Neighbors

If you want to gain good rankings, SEO experts recommend using a dedicated IP address to host your website. That suggestion may seem useless. As you might guess already, it’s not.

The reason is your IP neighborhood. Just like real neighborhoods can suffer from the actions of marginal elements inhabiting them, your shared IP can harm your SEO if there are low-quality websites available through the same address. For example, the shared hosting IP can host your website together with casino, scam, or fraud resources. Then, when one of such sites gets blocked, other ones will most probably get banned as well. As a result, your resource will become unavailable. Regarding the effort and funds invested in creating, filling, and optimizing the resource, the use of shared hosting IP addresses is not worth a risk.

Server Location

The server’s location can cause a negative impact on your website’s SEO effectiveness as well. In case the website’s user is located far away from the server physically, the page load time increases significantly. This point is especially critical for web resources that have a lot of graphical and video content kept on them.

See Also: Affordable & Reliable OpenVZ VPS

How to Choose

The choice of your hosting provider should depend on the type and complexity of your site. Here are the most popular categories and types of hosting they might need:

Small and middle-size projects receiving up to 10 visitors per second, such as blogs, forums, small online shops, etc., can have enough with the possibilities offered by virtual hosting.

If your small project needs expanded possibilities and more server resources (info portal, big online shop), then you might want to get a virtual dedicated server.

A website with a well-developed loyal community of visitors and a lot of content (media resources, news sites, huge web marketplaces, etc.) should have a dedicated physical server in its region.

Finally, a site with a huge audience and lots of content (international media, social networks, and sites like eBay or Amazon) will feel well only with their own data centers or rented dedicated server capacities.

Free Hosting?

Here is what you should know. The only advantage of free hosts is the fact that they are free. None of them can guarantee stable connection, uptime, tech support, and performance. Your site can have a bad neighbor using black SEO or being already banned by Google, and you won’t be able to control things going on around your resource in a digital space. Finally, a website can disappear at any moment, and you won’t be able to restore it anyway. 

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