Does web hosting really matter for SEO? We will explain 7 crucial hosting factors that affect SEO and the truth that will solve some misconceptions.
Web hosting is a huge topic and one of the best for affiliate marketers. You will get many types of articles with different views and theories. Some of these theories create misconceptions among beginners and newbies.
Yes in short YES website hosting affects SEO and rankings but it doesn’t matter that much. Website hosting puts very little effect on SEO but still, it is very important to have decent hosting for your website.
As it is the base foundation on which you are going to build your content structure and it needs to be strong. There are some hosting factors that can affect your site negatively which will result in a ranking drop in search engines.
What is SEO, and how does it work?
SEO (Search engine optimization) is a practice or system through which web browsers order the website in their search engine. Search engine optimization helps you to get organic traffic from the search engine.
Thanks to SEO, whenever you search for something in a search engine, I am sure you get the exact result of what you search for.
Nowadays, everything is getting digitalized, and there are thousands and hundreds of websites for one particular service and product.
Therefore, big tech giants like Google, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft have developed different protocols or rules for ranking websites in the search engine.
Search engine optimization plays a vital role in displaying valid search results in the browser. There are various things that come into play behind SEO, including a backlink, hosting, website theme, content, plag free content, and other different things.
If your website meets or includes all these things, the search engine algorithm will filter and rank your website in the search engine.
How does web hosting work?
In past decades web hosting was very expensive, and there were very few hosting companies in existence. Maintaining remote servers in different locations of the world was a very tedious and costly task. Therefore, most companies used to set up their server and host their website.
But today, things got changed; there are hundreds and thousands of hosting companies in the market right now. Users can choose the hosting plans depending upon the size and customer of the website. If you don’t know what web hosting is and how it works, don’t worry.
Web hosting is a storage space that is online 24/7. To be specific, it allows you to host or install your website in that particular space or server.
The server is located all around the world and can be accessed from any place in the world. For example, when you click on a website o any web browser, it sends a request to the server where it is hosted.
Once the website verifies your request, it will give you access to the site and the content. Now whatever you click on the website, it will send a request to the server and load the information on your screen.
This is how you interact with a website server from a particular website. Similarly, if the website server is not responding well and is slow, it will also slow down your website.
What are the hosting factors that can affect website SEO?
Now, I assume you’ve got some idea about web hosting and the backend behind how web hosting provides space into your website.
Hosting plays a vital role in the website SEO, Speed, and Ranking. If you have hosted your website on a good server, you will avoid a lot of issues on your website.
The market has got very crowded that it has also become tough to choose the hosting from the market. Therefore, it is worth knowing some factors that could help you choose the best hosting plans from this crowded market. Here is the list of 7 factors that can affect website SEO.
Slow Website
Visitors are less likely to wait for a website that takes a long time to respond. There are hundreds of websites for any particular niche and category in the search engine.
Therefore, the visitor will always avoid such websites so do search engines. If you have bought a cheaper or free hosting plan from a random platform on the internet, you will experience a lag in your website.
Every search engine has a different parameter for measuring a website. I recommend you choose a website that has a good loading speed.
Search engines like Google and Bing penalized sites having higher loading speeds. They will drop your ranking from the search engine, and you will lose all your organic traffic and customer from the internet.
Besides this, there are also other factors besides hosting that could affect the loading speed of your site. But you can fix the internal factor to improve website speed, but it is not a good practice to change your hosting repeatedly. Therefore, always consider a website that has a faster loading speed.
Website Downtimes
Downtime is another factor that can affect the ranking of the website. You need to avoid hosting plans having a high downtime rate at any cost.
If you don’t know what website downtime is, then let me tell you that downtimes refer to inaccessible or down for a particular period. Search engines flag such sites which continuously get unavailable and down.
Companies like Google and Microsoft have deployed algorithms that can quickly detect websites having higher downtime rates.
Search engines consider such sites unreliable and decrease your availability of sites in the search engine. But, the fact is, it is tough to know if the hosting has downtime or not.
Every hosting platform claims to provide lower downtime, but it is not true. Therefore, it is better to note a review from another user who has already bought the hosting plan that you are planning to buy. There are various review websites on the internet. You can visit these sites and find almost every hosting plan review.
Database connection failures
Database connection failure is another factor that could affect the ranking or SEO. I am sure you must have encountered an “Internal Server Error” error when browsing the website.
Similarly, some websites may display a “Database connection Failed” message. These issues are associated with database failures.
Database connection failure is displayed when the website is unable is establish a connection with the database located in the server.
There are two main reasons that could encounter database issues in the website: configuration issue and another when multiple users are accessing the same content.
A good hosting plan provides additional server support when multiple users access the same content on your website. The hosting provider safeguards your content by caching into another server and allowing access to content when needed.
The best hosting plans to avoid database connection issue is VPS or Dedicated server web hosting plans. These plans come with enough space and capacity to withstand thousands of visitors in real-time.
Using shared hosting services with the spammer
If you are planning to buy a hosting plan, you must have seen shared hosting plans on the website. It is often considered as starting plan for the user who has just started blogging or deploying a project onto the server. A feature-rich and good hosting plans are often expensive and get out of user budget.
In this case, shared hosting plans are preferred to starting users. It is cheaper, and you can access all the features available in the premium plans.
But, the downside with a shared hosting plan is speed or load time is not stable in this hosting plan. Because in shared hosting, hundreds or even thousands of websites share the same server and space.
As multiple sites are hosted on the same server, it will increase the chance of the server getting flagged. For example, if there is one site distributing malware and running a scheme to scam people, the Search engine will flag the IP address where that particular website is hosted. You are also hosted on that specific server, which will also decrease your ranking in search engines.
But nowadays, most companies have found the solution to this problem as they continuously monitor spammer-related activity. If they detect any kind of suspicious activity, it will terminate that site from accessing the hosting service.
Incorrect TLD
Top-Level-Domain is another factor that search engine looks at in the website during ranking. TLD is the parts of the domain that comes after the dot in the website address.
It is country and works specific, and it is one of the hundreds of factors that play a vital role in the SEO of a website.
Some of the popular TLDs that most search engines prefer during ranking are .com, .org, .net and .edu. If you use country-specific TLD, then the search engine will rank that particular domain in your country
. Similarly, there are also TLDs that are less recognized by search engines like .xyz, .abc, and other similar domains. These TLDs are cheaper in comparison to .com TLDs.
The advantage of the popular TLDs domain is that they are easy to remember and could significantly impact your overall website traffic. Though it is a bit costly, it will sound a bit genuine and valid compared to cheaper TLDs.
Hosting limitation
Almost most of the Hosting plans come with some kind of limitation. The problem with this hosting plan is it can limit your website features to your visitor.
For example, hosting plans restrict your website’s maximum number of visitors. In this case, you exceed this limitation, your website will become inaccessible and could affect the SEO of your website.
Besides this, some website has bandwidth limitation; some has redirect limitation and space limitation. Such hosting plans can limit the growth of your website in the search engine. So, it is recommended to study the plans properly you are planning to buy from the hosting company.
Ensure that the hosting plan meets all your requirements and can withstand the number of visitors to your website. There should not be a limitation that could hinder the growth of your website in the search engine.
Locations
Location is not a big factor to worry about in your hosting plans. These days servers are located all around the world, and you can easily change the location of the server within a minute.
Location matters when hosting your site on a server located on a different continent. When you host your website in another country, there will be a little delay in website load speed.
If your website serves users of your home country, I recommend you search the server near your location. It will avoid load delays in your website.
The benefit of choosing the server near your location is customer service support in your native language. Besides this, if your website serves services that are illegal in that country. I recommend you not to host your website in those countries.
What to look for SEO-friendly hosting?
If you are a newbie, I am sure you must be confused about what to look for before buying hosting plans for your website. There are various things that come while buying SEO-friendly hosting plans. Here in this section, we will look at different things while buying SEO-friendly hosting for your website.
High uptime
Uptime is arguably one of the essential factors you should not miss when buying hosting plans. Uptime is measured in percentage; the industry-standard uptime speed is 99.9 percent of uptime.
Hosting having uptime below is considered the worst hosting plan; you should avoid such hosting plans at any cost. Uptime cannot be fully 100% any hosting plans that claim 100% uptime is not real. The main point is there needs to be very short downtime.
Server location
As mentioned earlier, server location is one of the hundred factors behind the SEO of the website. Server location determines the load time of your website or how quickly it is accessible to the user.
Depending upon the visitor of your website, I recommend you to choose the server near to the visitor location. Many hosting companies have servers across different continents, making it very easy to change and host depending on your requirement.
Additional features
After buying hosting, getting your site online is another tedious task. Therefore, most hosting plans offer a one-click website installation process through which you can easily take your website online within a matter of a click.
If you don’t have proper knowledge of putting a website online, ensure that your hosting provider provides software to put your website online.
Besides this, I also recommend you to check if the hosting plan has automatic backups, SSL, and options for multiple hosting plans or not.
Because, as the website grows, your requirement also increases in the long run. Therefore, it is better to choose the hosting company that provides proper backup and multiple hosting plans features.
Reviews
A hosting company can claim to be the best hosting provider in the market. But, it is necessary to verify if that particular hosting provider is saying true or not.
There are lots of websites on the internet where you can find reviews of every hosting plan and the company. So, I recommend you do proper research about the plan through a review site or from the people who are using the hosting plan that you are planning to buy.
Customer support
Customer support is another important thing that you should take into consideration when buying hosting plans. After you take your website back online, you will face various problems in the initial days.
So, for this, you need to seek support from hosting providers. A good hosting provider has 24/7 support that you can get support at any time.
Is free hosting good for SEO?
A free thing comes with a string attached, as we have heard this saying for a long time. The same applies to hosting plans.
The free hosting server is best for anyone learning to deploy their project online that does not pose any kind of security threat to the visitor. If you are hosting a commercial or informative website for free hosting, you should avoid doing that.
Free hosting is a shared hosting where multiple users host their website. Similarly, the hosting provider can have full access to your website database and could pose a severe security threat to the visitor.
Therefore, the short answer to this question is no free hosting plans are not preferred. It can create a bad impression on your website visitors and could affect your ranking in the search engine. You could lose potential traffic and lets a competitor rank on the first page of the result.
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