Web hosting is often an afterthought because people believe the only important factor is price. If you are looking for cheap web hosting packages, there are many to choose from. However, this does not necessarily mean that they are all good deals. Ideally, you should go for the web hosting company that has enough bandwidth, and disk space offers fantastic customer support, is easy to use, and has unlimited features.
How does Web Hosting Impact SEO?
Google, Yahoo, and Bing all use a web host’s IP address when they crawl the website. Using Google Analytics’ referral section, you can see where your traffic is coming from. If it isn’t from search engines, something else is directing people to your site.
While keywords in titles and URLs help search engines find your site, it won’t help if a potential customer ends up at a competitor’s site because they have a better hosting service or more favorable terms of service. Below, we explain five critical hosting factors that can directly impact SEO.
- Bandwidth and Disk Space
As a general rule, you should host as much content as possible on your website to maximize the potential search engine rankings. You need enough bandwidth and disk space to be able to handle multiple high-resolution images, videos, and files all at once. If you are using a web hosting company that limits the amount of storage you can use, it can affect your overall website performance.
For example, if there is not enough space for your high-resolution photos or video files, it will slow down download times significantly. While Google does not take site speed into account when ranking pages in search results, hundreds of factors are still involved in their search algorithm.
- Uptime and Reliability
The biggest mistake you can make with your host is choosing one with a poor track record. It’s important to find a company that provides reliable and consistent uptime for your website.
Otherwise, you could see your search engine rankings plummet because of site downtime or slow response time. You need to know how other customers feel about the quality of service they received from the web hosting company, so it is always best to read customer reviews before signing up with any web host.
- Incorrect TLDs
Incorrect TLDs may affect your SEO rankings for a variety of reasons. The use of incorrect top-level domains (TLDs) can prevent a website from indexing, which means it will not appear in the search results.
Incorrect TLDs could also result in slow crawling and indexing times because Google uses them to determine the geographical location where the site should be ranked. Also, if you plan to target users from a specific country, then using an incorrect TLD would defeat that purpose.
- Location of the Server
For local searches, especially those that include geographic modifiers such as [New York] or [Los Angeles], web hosting companies have to truly understand how these kinds of queries work. Location is one of the most important parameters that determine search rankings, so web hosts have to be located in the same place as their clients.
Even if you target customers from overseas, it would be easier to optimize your SEO if your hosting company is near them. Again, this may not apply to all types of sites, but for those that use location-based queries, the server location becomes an essential factor in deciding which web host you should choose.
- Support
As with the best resume writers or Essayontime.com, good support team can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful website. Problems will arise at some point during your site’s lifetime – may be slow loading times or hacks by malicious users – and problems like these require quick resolutions.
You need web hosting support that is responsive, knowledgeable, and capable of troubleshooting your problems as soon as they arise. You don’t want to deal with frustrating wait times or outsourced support that doesn’t really know what they’re doing.
The truth is that there are plenty of hosting companies out there that can meet all the criteria we just mentioned and provide high-quality service for cheap rates. Choosing the right web host does not have to be difficult if you do your research and look at each company’s track record before making any decisions.
