4 SEO Factors You Need to Know About Web Hosting
Let’s talk about it “How does hosting affect SEO?” What does web hosting have to do with SEO? Which host is the best? This article will clear up the confusion and provide the facts.
Web hosting is an extremely niche market in the affiliate industry. This means that web hosting is a niche in the affiliate space. People are encouraged to write articles and make claims about how it can improve your SEO. So that they can earn their commission whenever you buy a hosting plan.
Factors: How does hosting affect SEO
1. Page Speed
Page speed is an important ranking factor. We all know this. It’s still unclear how big a factor it is (despite Google claiming that it’s a “teeny tiny” factor). But, this is not the issue.
Your speed may be affected if you choose a small web host that doesn’t have the bandwidth you require. It is important to choose the right plan.
For example, if you own a major news website, you won’t want to host with a shared plan that has limited bandwidth and can’t handle breaking news traffic.
Based on the needs of your website, you will need to decide whether shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, cloud-based scalable hosting or a hybrid solution.
All of these are fine for SEO depending on the content of your website and how many visitors/resources you need.
2. Hosting restrictions
There are some web hosts that have very specific limitations. One client hosted on a platform that didn’t allow them to access their.htaccess files. The limit they could do was 1,000, which is not what should have been allowed.
This doesn’t affect SEO by itself, but it can, depending on the purpose of your website.
You need to ensure that your host is capable of handling all the daily tasks you have on your site.
3. Location
Host location is less important with CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai.
This is where it matters most: on the international and legal sides. It’s best to have the site hosted in China or Russia if you are looking to do business in China or Russia.
You can’t host anything in countries that are illegal for you to do (e.g., a bitcoin pool or sports gambling or criticisms of royalty).
These are not SEO, but they could be a problem for your SEO plans.
4.Uptime
This was something we used talk about a lot back when hosting was available via dial-up or T1 lines.
CDNS, redundancies, and things like Microsoft Azure and Amazon cloud services are not a problem today.
While it is possible for some internet or cloud services to go down occasionally, you need to ensure that your downtime is minimized. These issues are often temporary.
Things that don’t really matter when it comes to “How does hosting affect SEO”
I am constantly hearing about Class C IPs. This topic was once very popular with spammers who wanted to hide their spam from Google.
Google could find them more easily if they were all in the same environment. Although this is true, there are other ways to find spam networks. These methods don’t consider the noise and uncertainty that might be present on your server.
Analytics, advertising tags, themes, social widgets and HTML comments all gave away spammers’ email addresses before.
Google is aware of this and will most likely not hold it against you.
Another pet peeve of mine is “___ Hosting” where ___ refers to a platform such as WordPress, Angular, React or AEM and Contentful or any other CMS/framework that you choose.
Some hosts are experts in this area. If you are an expert in your field, you shouldn’t have any problem choosing your server setup from any web host.
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To get the best setup possible for your needs, you can control Windows/Linux, Cpanel/Plesk, or any other server software down to the operating system and version of PHP or MySQL.
If you are just starting out or don’t have the time to manage a server, you may want to hire a maintenance team that is familiar with your chosen architecture. However, this is not an SEO decision.
