Does hosting affect your site's SEO?

In its official releases Google says that more than 200 factors affect a site's position. Hosting holds one of the higher places on that list. To understand how strongly it affects a site's standing in Google, let us first go through the theory.

Hosting is the service of renting server resources to a site's owner. An important feature of a server is that it runs without interruption. That is what keeps the site constantly available. 

Hosting and site promotion 

By its very definition, hosting will have a very substantial effect on a site's SEO metrics. Let us work out why, and exactly how. 

• A site's positions depend on its availability and steady operation. The percentage of time a site runs without interruption is called uptime. Ideally it should be above 99%. Why does that figure matter? Imagine your server's uptime is 95% or even lower. That means that out of every hundred minutes the site will be unavailable for five (not necessarily in a row). A search robot may come to the site during that time. And if it cannot get in, no indexing happens. The result is unpleasant — the site's positions fall. 

• Free hosting is a poor decision. In one of our articles we have already written about the drawbacks and risks of free hosting. So we will simply remind you that search robots see sites on free hosting and deliberately lower their positions. Serious portals and large online shops are always kept on paid hosting only.

• Doorway sites used for black-hat SEO are often placed on free hosting. Being their neighbour has a negative effect on the statistics and the main SEO metrics of the other resources. 

• The larger the site, the more strongly hosting affects how it works. That is especially noticeable with information portals. If the hosting resources are too small, the site will throw errors and hang. That very quickly spoils the behavioural factors and the positions fall. 

Conclusions. What do you need to know when choosing hosting?

What else should be taken into account when choosing hosting? 

Free services have low uptime, slow site loading and limited disk space. Other drawbacks are the absence of technical support and third-level domains. 

Besides storing sites, paid hosting offers several other pleasant bonuses. As a rule these are free SSL certificates, site builders and other extras. 

With good hosting a site will be better protected from being hacked and will run steadily. Users will notice. As a result the average time spent on the site improves, and Google and the other search engines raise your site higher in the results.  

Host4Biz will keep your site running steadily and store it securely! Choose hosting and register a domain through our site.