Wow, does a website's hosting company have that much affect on SEO?

[georgetsn]

As a small SEO agency, we also handle hosting for some of our clients. Our clients' sites are Wordpress. We set them up with a Bluehost account with a dedicated IP address, and spend a lot of time focusing on load times (implementing a CDN, optimizing images, installing W3 Total cache and using recommended settings, etc.).

Last month, we had a client inform us that they are bringing their web marketing efforts in-house, so they switched to a new hosting provider and took their (existing) site to the new hosting company.

They kept their old Google Analytics code installed, so I can still see how much traffic they're getting. Since switching to a new host, despite the load times taking longer, no CDN, and other errors that came up prior to us spending time "optimizing" the website, their organic traffic has increased by 26%. Same exact website, same inbound link profile. According to Webmaster Tools, their impressions and clicks have also seen dramatic increases.

So now, obviously, I'm considering looking into other options for the hosting of our other clients' websites.

From your experience, and especially when it comes to Wordpress websites, do you think that a hosting company can make that big of a difference in terms of SEO? I've heard of positive results from people who have used WP-Engine, and other Wordpress-dedicated hosting companies, but I just find it hard to believe that we spent so much time on load-time-specific ranking factors and come to find out, a different hosting company would have made a huge difference. Any thoughts/feedback?

[RyanPurkey]

Even though the hosting was changed, a lot of other factors could be coming into play: age of the site, freshness from republishing, increase in organic search terms, branding lift and others... Those things separately or in aggregate could account for the 26% lift.

[EGOL]

Just telling a story here....

I once used a host that offered "unlimited file transfer" and lots of other unlimited stuff.  Not sayin' any names here.  Really, no host can offer you "unlimited" amounts of certain resources for $4/month or $10/month or $40/month or more  and make a profit.

So, when my traffic got up to about 1500 visits per day they were throttling my usage.  They were not capping the bandwidth, instead they were capping database connections, or some other metric to keep me from running costs that were higher than I was paying them.   Yep, I had unlimited bandwidth but I didn't have unlimited amounts of other resources needed to run a successful site.

At that host my sites were down a lot, timed out a lot. They didn't notify me that I was being throttled.  They just did it.  Instead my visitors noticed and I noticed and Googlebot probably noticed when he came to crawl my pages.

When I switched hosts, wow the traffic went up.

So, now I use hosts that charge me for every bit of resource that I use.   They want me to be extremely successful and fuel my hosting with all of the resources needed, because the more successful they help me to be the more money they will make.  And, I pay them a lot of money.

Most people on these "unlimited" plans never have a problem because they don't get much traffic... dozens of visitors per day or hundreds.  But, if you have a site that is starting to become quite successful you might run into a situation where they need throttle your usage or change the agreement with you.

If you read BlueHost's "usage policies" you will see that they will throttle your service to protect their interests.

we do occasionally have to constrain certain accounts that use resources beyond what would be expected in the normal operation of a personal or small business website.

Read the full policy.   I can't link to it, it opens in a window.

I really like my host because they look forward to me being successful because they want to charge me for all of the resources that I consume at published rates.

[MoosaHemani]

The best part about EGOL sir is that he is very knowledgeable and at the same time have amazing way of explaining that always stops me from saying anything mostly because everything I ideally wanted to say was out in his answer.

Today is no different!

My only point was to go for a hosting that care for you and wanted you to grow instead of offering unlimited services that might cause a down time. You ideally don’t need a down time as this will hurt your traffic and branding to an extent.

My only advice when it comes to hosting is to choose the best instead of choosing the one that offer the best rates.

Hope this helps!

[danwebman]

One other thing I would say is we have a managed server which was getting a little long in the tooth (old) so we upgraded to a new server. The Speed of delivery went up 10 fold and so did the Google rankings.