The online marketplace is ever-growing and companies are eagerly seeking for top rankings in Google search engine.
If your website doesn’t rank on the first page of Google, be whatever the online marketing platform, local search, paid listing or organic SEO result, it is expected to not get noticed at all.
Now let’s talk about web hosting and Online Marketing.
What hosting option do people choose mostly?
The answer is Shared Web Hosting and the major reason behind this is low cost.
Worried about web hosting affecting online marketing efforts and rankings? Well I say, this is a genuine concern, and now we will discuss here.
Without a doubt, Shared Hosting is the only source for startup, small and medium business, but it has some major disadvantages.
Listed below are important factors that can affect SEO rankings and online marketing efforts.
Server Downtime
If your website suffers from web server downtime very often, it is time your shift your website to a reliable hosting provider. Downtime not only affects a website’s overall performance but it also brings down its SERP and SEO.
If search engine spiders crawl your website and find a downtime with no data, it will definitely show up other websites on top, thus affecting your online marketing efforts and SEO rankings
Page Load Time
Page load time does not majorly occur due to hosting provider. It even relies on how your website is designed and how heavy is your web design code.
It is a universally acclaimed fact that if a website takes more than two seconds to load, visitors are more likely to switch to the next possible option.
Moreover, a website with high load time will get a high bounce rate that affects directly on its search engine rankings. As said above page load time is not majorly due to the server, but there are 20% possibilities of your increase in page load time due to old specifications of the server provided by your hosting company.
An updated server used latest caching technologies that help managing high traffic to a website.
Some of the best online tools to measure page load time are:
Google Page Speed Tool
GT Metrix
PingdomAvoid Shared Hosting or low cost shared hosting
All that is cheap will not be good. When you opt for a shared hosting, your server hosts multiple websites. The major reason vendors sell shared hosting at cheap rates are because of the multiple accounts they sell to.
Too many websites on a server make it automatically slow, provoked to spam and virus attacks.
If you are having an e-commerce store, I strictly suggest opt for a dedicated server, this will not just make your website super fast, but will be secured and will give a good user experience to your website users.
However, if you are a startup or medium scale business online, and cannot afford a dedicated server, check for a number of accounts on the server, which your shared hosting company will offer. Check for server specifications too. Your image and user experience should not be compromised for low cost shared hosting.
Choose Local Host To Target Local Audience
Server location plays a major part in providing your website visitors a swift browsing experience. Having server location close to target audience results in faster loading of web pages to audiences of your website.
If you are buying your domain from India and need to target Indians, your web hosting service should also be from India. This will make your website load faster.
Creative provides XEON QUAD CORE high-end Servers from India and Canada. We provide 24 hours email support and 8 hours phone support services. Our servers are 99% spam free.
You can check our hosting packages from here http://www.creativewebhosting.net/
Bad Neighborhood
If may be exposed to security and SEO threats if you are using a Shared IP Address with your shared hosting server. There is a problem in shared hosting server that you might be part of what Google calls a ‘bad neighborhood’.
It means that if any other other websites on your shared server have been flagged as a spammer, then everyone on that server (i.e. same IP address) will be affected. Your shared hosting provider should take care of this on high priority and should provide zero spam servers.
Backups
We can face disaster and lose the data on your website. Can be a malicious attack or a natural disaster that wipes out data from website and server.
Your shared hosting provider should always keep regular backups of our websites on their servers.
Lost data = Lost rankings = Lost customers.
Do you have all the patience to start from scratch? Obviously not!
Do ask for backup services in your hosting packages.
SSL Certificate Installation
SSL in URLs is a major SEO ranking factor. As a business owner, you probably already know this. But it bears repeating. Trust is everything.
In order to build trust with your audience, and gain major SEO rankings, your website domain should open with https URLs too. Your hosting company should provide and support SSL certifications for your domain.
So What Can You Do?
One good thing about web hosting, in general, is that it’s quite fast and easy to switch to a reliable hosting company and ask all the above points before signing the contract.