This article explores the relationship between Web Hosting and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
1. Down Time & Crawling
It is important that you choose a web host that provides a reliable service. Your web host should have an uptime percentage of 99.5% or higher. If your website goes down frequently, you might miss the opportunity to get your new content indexed by search engines. If you are unlucky, the search engine crawler might have tried to access your website when it was down. Since you missed on the search engine crawl, you might not get your latest content index by the search engine for a while.
2. Slow Loading Pages
Slow loading web pages can reduce the SEO score for your website. Slow loading pages also annoy human visitors. When someone visits your website and if it takes too long to display, then the person may leave your website immediately. The issue here is that Google tracks how much time the user spent on a web page before returning back to the Google search page. If the user leaves your website within seconds (because the page is taking a long time to display), Google will track this information. When Google finds that your website loads very slowly on a consistent basis Google will reduce the webpage’s ranking in search results. Google does this in order to give the best user experience for its users. Therefore, it is very important to choose a web host that provides good performance.
3. IP Ban on Shared Hosting
In a shared hosting setup the IP address used by your website is shared by many other websites that reside on the same hosting computer. In the past if another website on the same hosting server is involved in malicious activities and gets banned by a search engine then your website may be also affected by the ban. This used to be true, but now search engines like Google are smart enough to know that your website is different from the malicious website (even thought both are on the same server) . This means you will not lose any SEO rankings due to a ban on another website on the same hosting computer. Do not worry about IP ban on a shared hosting environment.