Many of the website owners are largely doubtful about it, and as many blog articles are proving and disproving it, this confusion intensifies. Let’s explore it in a bit more detail here to identify what is the truth behind it.
As an overview of it, we can say that even though choosing a high-performer web hosting service doesn’t guarantee any instant rankings boost; it does imply that you avoid any adverse consequences, which may be sometimes critical, and surely gains the direct and indirect of benefits of it in long-term SEO.
Moreover, it is essential that you choose a good hosting provider to ensure optimum customer satisfaction, so the decisive factor shouldn’t be price alone.
3 Major decisive factors
To put more light into it, we will discuss three major web hosting factors to consider to ensure the benefits mentioned above. Two out of there factors discussed below, as speed and uptime may fluctuate from time to time, so you have to keep a close eye on them. As soon as you spot an issue, one should immediately touch base with the support center and troubleshoot it immediately.
Another initial tip is to subscribe to a hosting plan which takes payment every month than one year or three-year lump sum. With this, you are free to move your site to another hosting if the performance of the provider is not up to the mark. Let’s look into the three major web hosting factors, directly and indirectly, affecting your website ranking.
Uptime
Downtime is a concept which accounts for the timings when your website is unavailable to the users. This may be mostly used to the issues in the servers in which it is hosted. Unlike a user, the search engine bots will be accessing your site several times a day, and if they try to access your site during downtime, they move on to the next without crawling your site and by reporting it. If this is the case repeatedly, then the bots will flag your website as unreliable and ranking gets downgraded.
Even if the hosting service offers a 99% uptime, it means there is a chance for your site to be inaccessible for about 7 hours a month. Ideally, the assurance you have to seek for is nothing less than 100% uptime, downtime up to a minimal level is inevitable most of the times. So, you can accept at to 99.9% uptime, nothing less. For better SEO, white hat link-building also need to work in combination with appropriate hosting techniques.
Performance/speed
Usually, search engines were much secretive about the ranking factors which they give priority in their algorithms. But, Google specifically announced that loading speed is one of their top-ranking factor over 200 others.
Experts say that even a one-second delay in page loading may adversely affect your ranking. A below average loading speed may not only be the fault of your hosting service. But, once if you optimized the content of the page for fast loading, then you have also to ensure it with the hosting provider that this optimization works out the best in real-time loading.
It’s so popular now that you share the web hosting server resources with many other sites too, which cuts down the cost, which may sometimes adversely affect the loading speed.
Server location
Along with various factors as the backlinks and content, to put forth the most relevant results, search engines also instantly check the location of the server from where a web page needed to be loaded from.
So, the location also plays a vital role in ranking. For example, a person searching for a particular service to access it from UK, search engines may tend to offer then results from UK servers rather. To determine where your site is based, the search engine uses various indicators as IP address. So, if you own a local business, then hosting your website in the region where you want to do business will help improve your visibility on searches of users from that particular area.
However, the flaw of doing local hosting is that your site may go lower in search results when people from other countries use the same keywords to search for websites like yours. You can still achieve higher ranking by hosting your website in another country, but there is certain criterion to be met to do this effectively. However, if you are a local business and wants to be searched for at best in a specific region, then avoid all these overhead and hosts accordingly.
Keeping all the above needs in mind, it is essential for website owners to do a bit of research before choosing an appropriate hosting provider. When you get on to the hosting marketing, one will find hundreds of thousands of options including many global brands competing in this sector. The success lies in leveraging this competition in your favor by finding the most reliable and successful hosting service provider at the best possible rates.
Article by Derek
Derek Iwasiuk is a freelance SEO specialist, offering his services primarily to many small businesses. He helps other in white hat link-buildings and also takes care of end to end aspects of digital marketing.
