Does Web Hosting Affect SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of increasing the relevance of web pages or websites as a whole through different techniques. These techniques persuade browsers to prioritize some sites over others, and these prioritized sites come up first in search results. SEO is quite relevant because it increases exposure over other websites, which is what every business owner wants. Optimization requires continuous effort and refining methods to maintain relevance on the scale.

What is Web Hosting in SEO?

Web hosting is a service offered by web hosts. It provides the necessary facilities to keep your website live. Web hosts keep your websites on servers connected to the internet so users can access pages on your website using their browsers.

When discussing search engine optimization, most site owners discuss on-page factors and rarely talk about how servers affect these factors. However, the quality of service provided by a host will affect your site's performance, so you should use a web host that places more importance on SEO. Software reviews expert Aleksandar Stevanovic from Techopedia shares that web hosts who emphasize the importance of SEO can help businesses boost their online ranking, increase conversation rates, and grow profit margins.

How Does Hosting Affect SEO?

Here are some of the many properties of a web host and how they influence the metrics that search engines judge sites with.

The Server's Performance

In web hosting, speed refers to how fast browsers can fetch your web pages from your server. Although speed is often attributed to issues with browsers, internet connection, and devices, it can also be a fault from the server. Search engines drop the rankings of slow websites, reducing their exposure in search results. Websites running on servers using the best caching technologies with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can avoid losing rank due to speed. The volume of resources on a server can also affect its load time.

The Reliability and Availability of the Server

Availability is a measure of the time shared between the uptimes (when your website is up and running on the server) and downtimes (when the server is not running due to maintenance needs).

Websites will be de-indexed if search engine crawlers scan them while they are down, which is detrimental to SEO performance. Server downtime also increases bounce rates (rate of single engagements) on your website, which is detrimental to SEO authority. Your website will not appear as a search result during downtime since it is not live, so your business will continuously miss out on potential customers with extended downtimes. Availability is often expressed as percentages of uptime.

The Server's Location

Search engines also consider a website's location (i.e., the server's location) when assigning relevance. When users surf the internet for information, search engines tend to prioritize results from sites in the same location because they are often more relevant than options that are further away.

Search engines achieve this feat by scanning the site's IP address, which is a digital address assigned to websites based on their location. For businesses or sites that cater to the needs of people in a specific region, it will be better to invest in a server in the same location to improve your results on search engines.

Amount of Security Provided by the Server

Search engines like Google and Bing would rather not send their users to unsafe websites, so they place importance on security and factor it in SEO rankings.

Secure web hosts provide HTTPS rather than HTTP because it is a more secure version featuring an SSL (secure sockets layer). Search engines favor websites with SSL certificates in rankings and are biased against sites with spam pages, fake backlinks, and other security threats.

It is important to note that search engines consider a site's reputation, so cases of hacks, malware infections, and other compromises in security will cost you your position in SEO ranking. Apart from search engine bias, web users also typically prioritize safe sites, often opting for sites with more security when choosing payment platforms, e-commerce stores, social media, and more.

The Amount of Support on Offer

Apart from providing SSL certificates, there are additional services or features that servers can provide to improve your SEO ranking.

Mobile compatibility is a factor in search result relevance because of the prevalence of mobile devices on the internet. Choosing a mobile-friendly server for your website can be another boost to your SEO relevance. Image optimization in servers helps to reduce load time, and periodic backups help reduce downtime through quick recovery.

Some servers also support your SEO performance by monitoring server performance and analyzing traffic.

The Type of Hosting

Besides your business's needs, search engine optimization should also come to mind when discussing what type of hosting to choose. The importance of your host type is made immediately apparent when you compare shared servers to dedicated servers.

Shared servers are much cheaper for companies, but they often contain more resources, reducing their load time. Virtual Private Server (VPS) and cloud hosting are other types of hosting that improve resource management on shared servers, but they have more technical requirements.

The following are the different hosting types and how well they will fit your website and business type:

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a popular hosting option that combines cheap and efficient web hosting.

Rather than solely or collectively paying for a physical server, you have the option of using virtual servers that perform the necessary computing on a pool of powerful servers. The pricing in cloud hosting is flexible, and the structure is highly scalable. However, you might rack up an expensive bill with high traffic.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is an arrangement where multiple companies host their websites on the same server, sharing their hardware resources. It is a cost-effective option for rising businesses and small sites, and it is easy to manage. However, shared servers are usually slow.

Dedicated Hosting

In dedicated hosting, the server only hosts one website, so web pages load faster on average and are more secure. Although there is a higher maintenance cost involved, dedicated hosting is a great option for large organizations with higher traffic and more resources on their websites.

VPS Hosting

VPS is also an alternative to shared hosting, where the server is virtually segregated into parts. Each site exists in an isolated unit with a share of the server's resources dedicated to it. Although it is also more expensive than shared hosting, it provides improved security and performance for websites at a reduced cost. Growing businesses can gain more control over their website with VPS hosting.

Colocation Hosting

This is a type of hosting service in which the site owner also owns the server but is not in charge of it. The server owners rent spaces in data centers where the server is physically maintained (electricity, cooling, and internet collection). This cuts the cost of maintenance, but the purchasing costs and technical requirements are still high.