When you’re trying to choose the right hosting service for your company, there are many considerations to keep in mind.
One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make is between dedicated and shared web hosting.
Dedicated web hosting means your company owns the entire server that runs your website. This option tends to be a lot more costly and labor-intensive than shared hosting.
Shared web hosting refers to paying a web hosting company to host your website, which means you’ll be sharing the server with the company’s other clients.
While shared hosting isn’t necessarily a bad choice when it comes to SEO, it can present some challenges of which you should be aware.
We’ll talk about how these two types of hosting services can affect SEO and the eventual success of your website.
Site Speed
You can write quality content for SEO until you’re blue in the face, but none of it will matter if your website is slow.
Site speed has become a crucial factor for search engine rankings.
If your website is slow, users will get frustrated and leave your page in a matter of seconds.
This increases bounce rate, driving your site further down in the search rankings.
Generally, you want every page to load in three seconds or less.
So how does this relate to choosing a web host?
Dedicated web hosting will speed up your website because you don’t have to worry about sharing server space and bandwidth with other sites.
But that doesn’t mean that shared web hosting is necessarily slow.
In some cases, it’s just as fast as dedicated hosting, but you’ll have to find a shared web hosting company which guarantees a fast load time for all your pages.
If your site is slow, you might need to optimize your content for faster load times.
Use these tips to get your site in the fast lane.
Data Center Locations
Another element to consider is the number of data center locations your web host provides.
A data center location stores your site’s files.
If you’re using a dedicated web host, files will be in your office because you own the server.
But if you use a shared web hosting service, file location depends on where the hosting service keeps its servers.
When choosing a shared web hosting service, find a company offering a data center location close to your customers and your site’s visitors.
The further away your customers are from the data center location, the longer it will take content to load.
If customers and visitors are spread out across the country, you’ll want to find a shared web hosting service with plenty of data center locations, so they can quickly provide your users with content.
If you’re a local business, find a hosting service with data center locations close to your office.
You could also use a CDN or content delivery system that helps load content faster.
This may be a great choice if you’re adamant about using shared web hosting or can’t find a data center location close to your customers.
Uptime and the User Experience
The web hosting service you choose should be able to offer 99.9 percent uptime.
Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is live. So, 99.9 percent uptime means it’s live virtually all the time.
Every company and website experience outages from time to time, but you want to minimize downtime as much as possible.
If your site goes offline, customers will leave your URL in seconds, alerting Google that something is wrong with your website.
This means your site will lose its place in search rankings.
Dedicated web hosting services generally do a better job when it comes to uptime, but a power outage at company headquarters could still take your site offline.
With shared web hosting, you depend on the hosting service to keep your website online.
That’s why it’s important to find a shared web host with a long history of 99.9 percent uptime.
Some sites may claim to offer this feature, but they might be pulling your leg, so do your research.
Customer service is also an important part of choosing a web host.
For both shared and dedicated hosting, you need to be able to get in touch with your host if your site goes offline unexpectedly.
How to Choose Your Web Hosting Service
The type of web hosting service you choose plays a small role in the success of your SEO strategy.
You could pick a dedicated web hosting service to keep your site in the fast lane.
But, if you’re not optimizing content for Google’s search algorithm or you’re writing poor-quality content, it really doesn’t matter which hosting service you choose because your SEO campaign needs improving.
Regardless of whether you have dedicated or shared web hosting, your site still needs to be fast and always available for users.
Even if you have a cheaper hosting option, you can improve site performance by using a CDN, optimizing your content, and monitoring site load time.
Choosing a web host is just one small piece of creating a successful SEO campaign.
When looking for a web host, find one which can provide excellent service to your customers by keeping your website fast and online.
Finding a quality web host allows you to keep your focus on executing an effective SEO campaign that helps you rank highly on Google.
