A reliable web host provider who guarantees an excellent uptime is crucial for any online business and every business, blogger, website owner, or online entrepreneur needs to know how to pick the best from the hundreds of available web hosts.
Every person or business with an online presence dreams of being top on search engine result pages where they get more exposure to potential customers and so increase their revenue in the online industry. After registering a domain, the next step is choosing a good web host. If you fail to do proper research and just choose a cheap web host, this decision will hurt you both in the short and long term.
Here is why your web host has the potential to affect your rankings on search engines.
1. Server Location
Since its inception, Google has been Geo Targeting search results. Therefore, results displayed are most of the time from the area the search originated from. This means that a website with a server in that area will get priority in the result pages.
Even though Google relies heavily on TLD’s, other tech giants are now using IP addresses to determine the geographical location of a server and website.
Therefore, if your target audience is in the United States but your website is hosted on a server in the United Kingdom or Asia, there is very little chance that you will appear on top of result pages, or ever in the first page of Google’s result pages.
To avoid this, you will need to do an analysis of where your target audience is located so as to know where your web host needs to be located. Having the server hosting your website close or where your target audience is goes a long way in pushing your website up the rankings in search engine result pages.
2. Server Quality
Another factor to consider when choosing a web host is the quality of the server. You need to consider both the physical qualities by measuring quantitative benefits like space, bandwidth, etc., and also how well the servers are managed.
Shared web hosting is a cheap option, and you may think that having unlimited space and bandwidth like most hosting providers offer is a good thing. You should however note that the server does not belong to you alone but is shared with hundreds of other websites. You therefore share the same space and bandwidth and thus your website’s performance will be affected by the performance of the other sites.
3. Page Load Speed
If your website takes ages to load, your readers will move on to other websites, and Google will also move you down search engine rankings.
Therefore, when choosing a web host, you should be aware of the strengths and weaknesses that will come with the plan you choose. Buying hosting from a top web host does not guarantee you quality services. Generally, shared hosting plans have less page load speeds than VPS or cloud servers.
Ensuring that your website loads fast will mean that readers will stay longer on your website which increases the average engagement time and also search engine rankings.
4. Uptime and Downtime
If you decide to go with a shared hosting plan or a cheap web host, your website will experience downtime. This means that your readers will not be able to access your website and Google’s crawlers and spiders also won’t analyze your website.
If your server is constantly offline, Google may flag it, which will ultimately have a negative effect on your rankings.
Cheap web hosts and shared hosting are the ones that suffer most from downtime. To be safe, only go for hosts that offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
5. Database Connection Issues
A database connection failure is another issue that is associated with poor web hosting services. If you have ever come across the error message “database connection failure” or “internal server error”, then this is because of a database connection issue.
This will mostly happen when your website receives a lot of traffic, more than your server can handle. The server will then crash because it needs to allocate your server more traffic than it is capable of.
When this happens, your site’s downtime is increased and all the SEO efforts you put into creating it go down the drain.
You should therefore always be concerned about the issues you may have to deal with after picking a web host and only select one with quality service.
