At first, it may not seem like SEO and website hosting are connected in any way, and it is true that ranking optimization consists of many, many parts. A reliable and fast hosting service, though, is one of those components and should be treated with the same care as any other business decision. With today’s rapidly expanding internet, free and cut-rate services abound, and if a company really wants to cut corners, they can go online for nothing at all. But that would be a mistake and could end up not only costing the company money, it could sink their online presence entirely and potentially set them back years.
Where do SEO and website hosting intersect?
Like with every conversation regarding ranking optimization, it begins with Google. The search engine giant owns 67 percent of the market on PCs, and more than a whopping 80 percent on mobile devices. In short, if a company wants people to know they exist, they will do everything to please Google. And what does Google want? It wants content-rich, easily navigable sites that are reliable and fast. Those last two points are governed by several components, but among the most important is the service in charge of keeping everything up.
It’s been known for years that when Google crawls pages online, it will flag any that are unresponsive. Losing Google’s trust is the quickest way to sink in the rankings, so it is crucial that a business’s online presence remain up for at 99.9 percent of the time. Anything less is unacceptable, but common among cut-rate and free services.
Speed is the other part of the equation, and Google has recently admitted that it does consider speed when configuring its rankings. It’s likely not a major component, but everything should be considered when trying to rank higher. Slow speeds are not always the fault of the gatekeeping service, but cheap services usually have no qualms about throttling back speeds to a client receiving a lot of traffic to please other clients and to keep their own operating costs down. Obviously, this is an unacceptable situation for an established company.
Are there other concerns with choosing a cheap service?
SEO is important, but website hosting that’s cheap or free is always going to be a liability to a company. Imagine a competitor notices that the company’s site is operating with a free or cheap service. They file a false IP claim against the company. What motivation does the service have to respond with anything other than shutting the company’s site down? They don’t want the trouble and aren’t out much, if anything at all. And poof, there goes all of the hard work the business has put into its online presence. And that doesn’t even address security, which is usually a problem with cut-rate services.
Additionally, cheap web hosts often don’t consider who they place on a server. If you website is hosted internationally or with bad sites, i.e. sites that are porn, bots, or spammers, you become guilty by association. May of the major companies do not screen customers to see the legitimacy of the business and just ‘host’ them. This should be a major concern to any serious web marketer and not information that is readily available.
A reputable service isn’t just some guy operating a server out of their bedroom. It’s a group of marketing and technical professionals who guarantee near perfect uptime, high speeds, and a close business partnership that thrives on mutual success. Any business owner knows that is the right atmosphere to work in.