This question has been posted numerous of times on almost every relevant hosting / SEO forum and website. Every time this question goes online, it ignites a rich discussions between almost everyone who has any type of an opinion on this sort of subject.
The thing that makes this topic so interesting to follow is its ability to provoke all sorts of different responses.
Some say web hosting has an affect on SEO rankings, others say it doesn’t. It’s just something that people can’t seem to agree upon.
Although I’ve read loads of interesting comments with quite different takes on this particular subject, we all know that there’s only one real truth behind this sort of thing.
In order to help every concerned person find some peace of mind, I have decided to address this question on our blog and provide you, our respected readers, with some hard facts on this matter.
So, to put it in simple words, can web hosting affect your SEO rankings? – The short answer is yes!
In some sort of way, we have already partly answered this question in one of our previous blog post, titled: Does It Matter Where My Server Is Physically Located?
For those who haven’t read that article, we wrote that, when it comes to SEO, it’s recommendable that you keep your servers close. Google ranks on loads of different factors. The geo-IP location of your servers is one of them, but it’s certainly not the most important one.
Being a web hosting company, whose servers are located in Netherlands and Sweden, we have a lot of Swedish and Dutch clients, because they have locally oriented businesses. It’s quite logical for them to choose us to host their websites.
For practical purposes, I wouldn’t worry about in what city your site is hosted in, but I’d recommend that you keep it within the same country borders.
If you, for an example, like some of our clients, sell primarily to Swedish people, then it would be quite smart for you to host your website on a server that’s located in Sweden. If you primarily sell to Canadians, then you should host your business on Canadian servers.
You can find acceptable hosting solutions in both countries.
Are you screwing yourself if you host a Canadian site on Swedish servers? No. But that being said, you might improve your SERP slightly if you host it in your “homeland”.
Also, next to this, which web hosting company you choose to do business with, could have a significant effect on where your website ranks in search engines. Choosing the right web hosting company for you means that you can avoid potentially “expensive” consequences, which is why price shouldn’t be the only factor when it comes to finding a “home” for your website.
Like I already wrote above, there are a lot of different ways on how your hosting provider could affect your search engine ranking. First, it’s uptime. If your site goes down at some point, and the search engine robots “crawl” it while it’s “out of order”, you’re in trouble.
As you probably know, Google uses robots to “crawl” your website. They are not those robots like the Terminator, so don’t get too excited.
Their mission is to access all the available information that’s on your site and match it with adequate queries. If your web page isn’t indexed right, the robots will have a hard time “”scanning” it, and that means that your content won’t find its way to people who are searching for it.
If you run a online business, you cannot allows this to happen.
Speed also plays a huge part in this equation. Site speed is almost entirely dependent on the quality of your hosting. A slow website might lead to fewer shares and backlinks, which is also something that affects your ranking.
A slow site is more likely to affect how deeply Google will crawl your website, and like we already mentioned above, it won’t rank your new content, if it faces difficulty finding it.
Website speed can make or break the SEO of your online presence.
Let’s, for the sake of the subject, say that you’re a plumber, based in Amsterdam. Obviously, you’re not the only one. There are a lot more plumbers who live and work in Amsterdam. So, how are you gonna compete with them? Why should people choose to business with you, and not your competitors?
Google algorithm has advanced to such levels that it can almost instantly figure out if your service is relevant enough to show it to the right audience. In order to make Google work for you, you need to play by its rules, and do everything in your power to make your service and web presence of prime quality.
If your website is faster, it will better convey information to the users, and they’ll be less likely to click back and thereby reduce your “bounceback” rate, which factors into your SEO.
Knowing this, we have decided to back our infrastructure with high-performance LiteSpeed Servers, that tend to enhance the standard Apache speed, up to 8 times it’s normal. Great, right?
A lot of people out there say that web hosting companies who use SSD’s have faster service. For those who are not familiar with the differences, HDD is based on the traditional spinning drive storage method, while SSD operates on a magnetic coating method.
Basically, they are both drives for storing data.
We don’t use SSDs because:
1. There a lot more expensive.
2. The improvements they offer aren’t quite that noticeable.
3. They can fail faster if the manufacturer brand is bad.
4. If your drive fails, you can lose all your data, and there’s no option on how you could recover it.
5. If you have let’s say one large drive with a Linux and Windows partition, if either gets corrupted it can corrupt the other one as well. This isn’t the case with HDDs.
We know that SSD’s offer a lot more “horsepower” than HDD’s, but, to 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?”
We at AltusHost like to put things to a test, before forming a solid decision about them. When it comes to hosting, it’s all about how good your server is optimized. Don’t get me wrong, using rubbish hardware will most certainly hurt you and your customers, but you also don’t have to spend money on something that’s out of your users league.
I hope that this post provided answers to all your hosting related SEO questions. If I missed something, be free to remind me in the comments section below, and I’ll do my best to get back to you with answers ASAP.
Thank you for taking the time to read this content. Be sure to share it with your friends and colleagues.
That’s it for now,
See you soon,
Kind regards,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
