Fast hosting

[PeterM22]

Hi everyone,

The host I use is OK, but looking for something lightning fast for a new project. Any know which hosts are the fastest and best for SEO?

[EGOL]

Most hosts can be lightning fast.

Slow hosting often occurs when the hosting company loads a large number of websites onto a single server.  That makes the websites compete for resources on an overloaded machine.  One cure is to get a dedicated server where you will have complete control over the amount of activity occurs on it.  That can be expensive.

There are also some situations of slow hosting when your host is in a different part of the world from your website's visitors - that is bad for SEO since the location of the host is sometimes used to determine your search engine rankings.  There are also still a few hosting services that are not genuine hosting companies, instead it is a  guy running a server on a machine in his basement with a slow connection to the internet.

The problem might not be with the host.  it is possible that you have inefficient programming, huge images, bad code or other problems that interfere with the processing of your website on the server or the rendering of the website in a visitor's browser.

[oznappies]

If you are looking for lightning fast response but do not want to pay high prices, then an option may be some of the VMware clusters or Cloud severs that scale up and deal with high traffic times. If you have bursts of traffic during certain periods of the day or month, such as specials etc, the you pay more for resources during those periods and less when your server is idle. These can be a good solution for medium to large business requirements without paying for clustered dedicated servers. If you do a search of 'cloud hosting' you can find a range on offer.

Speed can also depend of the type of content you are serving. If you intend to stream video on demand or similar services then you would need to ensure you host has the appropriate CDN facilities to meet your needs. If high data requirements then make sure the data centre can deal with that level of traffic without blocking issues.

If your need content delivered fast to various international destinations ensure the host has clusters in the datafeed areas for the countries your are targeting. e.g. To target Australia you do not want a datacentre in the US as that route is clogged so you would need Asia-Pacific centers etc.

[bloggidy]

I agree with the comments already presented. Many slow sites are that way because of how they are implemented. There are many free tools to help. Two tools that I use regularly when developing a site are YSlow and Firebug. Both are Firefox plug-ins that provide a great deal of information on the performance of a site.