Aspects of web hosting that can affect SEO

Does web hosting have any effect on SEO?

There are 3 web hosting factors that influence your website ranking. Here’s an in-depth look at them:

Uptime / idle time

Downtime is the period of time during which your website cannot be accessed due to server related issues. Search engine spiders are likely to visit your website many times a day. However, if they visit you when your site is experiencing downtime, they will record it as inaccessible and move on to the next site. When this happens over and over again, your website will be considered unreliable and your ranking may be lowered. Untrustworthy sites do not show up in search engine results as this will put them in a bad position when search engines click on the results they give but cannot access the site. Even if you have a 99% uptime, your website will not be accessible for a total of 7 hours over a period of 1 month. If possible, you will want your website to be 100% accessible at all times. However, websites are expected to experience some kind of downtime, even if they have expensive web hosting plans. However, there are web servers that offer and guarantee 99.95% uptime, so don’t accept less than this.

Speed

In general, search engines do not disclose the factors that pertain to their algorithms. However, in 2010, Google openly revealed that the speed at which a page loads is just one of those more than 200 factors. This is certainly a very small percentage effect (of only 0.5%) on your ranking. However, it is still worth considering. The loading speeds of its web pages are as follows:

When you have a lower than average loading speed, you don’t necessarily have to blame your web host. The slowdown may be due to the encoding and configuration of your website. However, if you are confident that your site’s technical setup has been optimized to the best of its ability, but you’re still getting poor load times, it’s time to ask your web host to transfer your site to a different server. Nowadays, it is quite common for a website to share server resources with many other sites. Unsurprisingly, more sites on a server consume more resources, resulting in slower load times. When you transfer your website to a private / dedicated server or one that is not too busy, you will see a rapid improvement in page load speed.

Rental

Apart from several different factors such as content and backlinks, among others, to display the most meaningful search results, search engines evaluate the location of the website to decide where to position it in their rankings. For example, when searchers are in the UK, search engines will typically show UK sites higher in their search results. In order to know where your website is located, they use some indicators such as the IP address of your site, which is assigned to your site based on the location of the server where it is hosted. So when your web hosting company has servers in the UK this could cause a higher ranking for your site when UK based people search for the keywords you have chosen.