Shared Hosting Vs VPS Hosting

[bronxpad]

From an SEO perspective what are the advantages of VPS Hosting VS Shared Hosting for a local website that has less that 200 pages and gets max 2000 hits per month?

Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?

[David_ODonnell]

For a site of that size and traffic volume I think you'll be fine with shared hosting - as long as you choose a reputable, quality host - which can be difficult when it comes to choosing a shared hosting environment!

I hesitate to recommend specific hosting companies because I've had both good and bad experiences with a number of hosts. Do your research and find a host with great support, reputation and standards.

[RyanKent]

Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?

In short, absolutely. Longer answer below.

Shared hosting typically involves hundreds of websites on a single server. Shared hosting is the lowest form of hosting offered. It is very common to have all types of bad sites (porn sites, mail spammers, etc) on the same server as your real estate site. Server outages are common along with numerous other issues such as having your mail server flagged for spam.

A VPS typically divides a server's resources like a pizza into 8 - 12 "slices". You have dedicated resources assigned to your site along with over a 90% reduction in the user population. If you care at all about SEO, which you apparently do based on your presence at SEOmoz, you should consider using VPS at a minimum for site hosting.

I have worked with clients in the past who have tried shared hosting with quality hosts. I worked with the hosts to move the sites to other shared servers which they deemed as more mature / stable. The sites still experienced monthly outages. Typical site owners are not even aware of these outages. As part of a solid SEO plan, you should use a monitoring service to notify you of any site outages. I use Alertra but there are many similar services available.

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your answer. I was also wondering what is your opinion on Rankings impact from changing Host providers?

I ask this because my current Web Host doesn't allow me to do a 301 redirect.

I have heard that changing providers can negatively impact search rankings because of the change of IP Address.

Note: my concern is duplicate content and split links to my site. From www and non-www version of home page along with the index.html version.

[bronxpad]

I have reached out to several  hosting companies and they stated that my site will be down for 24 to 48 hours if I transfer my site over to their service.

I am sure that this would impact my rankings for having the site down. They said it's because I will need to update the domain servers.

Is there any way to prevent downtime while transferring a site?

[RyanKent]

I was also wondering what is your opinion on Rankings impact from changing Host providers?

If done correctly, there is no negative impact at all. The primary issue is during the switch over itself.

The issues of duplicate content and split links should not be a factor. Those issues can potentially occur when URLs change. That does not happen if you are simply changing hosts. The same applies to the www vs non-www and index.html issue. If these issues are not presently occurring, and you properly move all files associated with your site, and your new server is properly configured, the items you mentioned will not be considerations.

[RyanKent]

The 24- 48 hours time frames are highly overstated. There are numerous methods of transferring a site with no downtime. Even if you have downtime, it is typically a couple hour period (locally) where some users will go to the old site, whereas other users will go to the new site. If you have a relatively static site which services a local area, such as a local realty site, the issue is quite minimal.

Here is the bottom line....your current site is hosted on a shared server which is so restrictive you can't even add a 301 redirect. To be candid, a site which has operated under those conditions could not reasonably be so hyper-sensitive to the potential short transition period from a simple server change. If I am mistaken, then you need to hire a professional developer to manage the migration on your behalf.

[Sean_Dawes]

What is the site built on? If wordpress, check out wpengine (no affiliation).  Just saw this post and wanted to respond as I had tons of downtime when I migrated a site to a shared environment on another host. Site kept having downtime no matter what I tried with support.  So you can imagine the frustration and how this can impact the business not just from a search perspective. I think the question here is how stable do you need something. Does shared work? Yea sure. But if you are putting something that is the core of your business on a $4.95mth host, than you get $4.95 worth of insurance.