Hosting and SEO

[monicapopa]

Hi all,

Does the hosting of an website affect your SEO?

We have a dynamic hosting currently, taking in account your knowledge and expertise, do you believe that this can affect SEO in any way?

Thank you for your time.

Good day.

Monica

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Monica!

To answer your initial question I would have to say YES it can definitely effect your SEO in a number of ways.

Uptime/Downtime, Speed and Location can all effect your websites user experience & overall rankings.

Regarding the dynamic hosting, I don't have much experience with that but will look into it and if I discover any good info I will let you know.

[Ray-pp]

Yes, the host you use for your website can have an effect on your SEO.

Bryan mentioned some aspects of website hosting that would impact SEO:

• Uptime/Downtime - if your website is offline often, GWT will pick up those errors
• Load performance - A slow host will impact your page load speed and that could lead to undesirable SEO impact
• Location - This could impact load speeds, same as above. Try and have your website content delivered through a CDN to mitigate this issue
• Shared environments / IPs - If your website is hosted in a shared environment, the activities of other websites using that same environment could impact your rankings.

The last point is particularly important, you don't want to be dragged down by a low quality network of websites and their suspicious activity simply because your site is hosted in the same environment.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Great point and I can't believe I left that out of my initial response lol. Thanks Ray!!

But yes, you can check your server using a site like: http://www.ipfingerprints.com/reverseip.php

This will show you if there are other sites hosted from the same server/ip address.

[monicapopa]

Hi Ray/ Bryan,

Many thanks for your answers, it does help. I just checked, and indeed there are other websites. However they look like genuine websites of businesses, or other, 17 in total with an average of 3 page rank.

I guess this shouldn't have a negative impact on us?

I tried looking up CDN could you please explain how this should be approached? Is there any resources you would recommend using?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Nice! Glad to be of help A few things I want to mention...

1. Using a shared hosting environment presents issues for your site that you may not realize are there. Example: The other sites on the server may not be doing "wrong" today, but if they begin doing "wrong" somewhere down the line it could ultimately effect the IP of the server. Trickling down and potentially harming your site at the end of the day.

"If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas" - I would highly suggest a dedicated environment. This keeps you in a controlled environment and allows you to focus on the more important things.

2. A server is just like a computer. When we buy it and it is brand new it works VERY fast and everything is awesome! As time progresses and we begin filling up the hard drive, the computer begins to slow down. Keep this same thought process with the server that is hosting your website. You want the hard drive on the server that hosts your website to be as free as possible, thus keeping your site running optimal.

A CDN is great to use is you are hosting heavy content like videos, large/several images, etc. We've used www.maxcdn.com in the past for certain projects and it was fairly easy to implement and use.

[monicapopa]

Bryan,

Many thanks for your time and answers, honestly it helps a lot. I am now reviewing our hosting options and see how we can improve things.

Good day,

Monica

[Ray-pp]

Cloudflare.com is a great CDN if you need a free or low cost solution.