It is easy to overlook the relationship between web hosting and SEO but actually this is becoming increasingly important. If you want to get your site/blog ranked highly on Google you will do yourself no favors by cutting costs on hosting.
So how are hosting and SEO linked? Simple really, Google want their users to get what they want quickly so that they continue to use the search engine. Google therefore do not look kindly on sites that provide a poor user experience. This is can be caused by:
Slow Loading Speed
Nobody wants to have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. If a site is very slow to load the user may give up, and go back to Google to select another site, or wait to see what comes up and then go back to Google. The user is unlikely to request another page, assuming that will also be slow, or return to the site in the future. The result is an unhappy visitor and a black mark from Google.
High Bounce Rate
One of the factors that is becoming increasing important for SEO is bounce rate. A user “bounces” if they go straight back to Google after seeing the page that comes up. This implies that the content was not particularly relevant to the search term or was poor quality. Either way it is a negative factor in terms of ranking for the search term.
As mentioned above a user may also bounce because the site is slow, regardless of the quality of the content. So a slow site can have a double negative effect.
Too Much Downtime
If a user finds your site on the search engine and clicks it only to receive an error message, that is a poor user experience. No site can be available 100% of the time but excessive downtime will count against it.
These problems can be experienced due to:
Overloading Servers
Entry level hosting packages are based on shared hosting where many user’s sites are hosted on one server. If the server is overloaded the performance level will suffer. This is a particular risk with free hosting where there is no contractual service level.
Lack of, or Poor Management/Support
It is important that the hosting company monitors the servers to ensure that users do not do anything that uses an unfair share of the server resources and also do not do anything unethical such as spamming. The former will impact the performance of the other users of that server and, in the worse case, the latter could get the server IP address blocked affecting all users.
Once again the risks are greatest with free hosting, particularly as the absence of any payment makes it easy to sign up anonymously.
Another key point relates to support. Unless you really know what you are doing you are likely to need help at some point. Providing quality support is costly so with free hosting it is likely to be via email during business hours (so if your site goes down on Friday evening it is hard luck). Even with paid hosting, where you expect 24/7 support, the quality varies.
Location of Web Server
It is inevitable that a site will take slightly longer to load when the user is on the other side of the world from the web server. See post Location of Website Hosting Company – Does It Matter? for more information.
Actually there is a solution to this geographic issue which also reduces the load on your web server and this is to use a Content Delivery Network. See post Use CloudFlare To Significantly Improve Site Security and Page Speed for more information on that.
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