How To Choose SEO Web Hosting

BlueHost, HostGator, WordPress hosting – the options are broad. Everyone who is running a website or getting ready to launch one knows that web hosting is pivotal for seamless operations, but not everyone knows the real implications of selecting the right solution.

How do you pick an option that works for you?

A web hosting provider isn’t just a necessity that makes your site accessible. It also affects a number of crucial website performance indicators, such as loading speed, uptime, and more. Respectively, it greatly affects user experience and even search engine optimization. Hence, if you want to gain a competitive advantage, drive plenty of traffic, and dominate search engine result pages (SERPs), you need to find reliable SEO web hosting, and we are going to tell you how to do it!

Understanding Hosting for SEO

Web hosting is a service that supplies you with a server, storage of crucial files that shape your website, and a well-defined network infrastructure that makes your site available on the web. Every site needs to have a hosting provider in order to operate and be accessible to users.

The role of hosting for SEO might be not too obvious, but it’s huge. Since the selected service provides you with storage space to build your site upon and hardware to make it operate, it directly impacts the security, uptime, loading speed, and accessibility of your pages. 

All these factors affect how search engines and users see your site. Respectively, you need a reliable SEO web hosting provider to succeed in SERPs and generate more traffic.

Key Factors to Consider When Picking SEO Web Hosting

Server Speed and Performance

A slow, weak, or overcrowded server can greatly underperform, causing significant delays in site loading. A lagging website, in its turn, can cause a number of issues for you. First of all, it might be frustrating and even annoying to users, hindering their experiences and forcing them to abandon your site and never come back. What’s also important for your search engine optimization is that loading speed is a direct ranking factor found in Google’s algorithms, so if your site loads slowly, it can hurt your visibility.

To check if your site loads fast enough according to Google standards, all you need is a reliable tool. For example, SEO Checker by SE Ranking is an all-rounded solution that brings a wealth of valuable insights to your fingertips. It enables you to check the speed of loading site pages, status codes (pages with 5xx status codes, timeout), Core Web Vitals, and other important SEO metrics.

By running speed tests, you can define whether your current website hosting is good for you or not. But what if you explore the need for an upgrade? In this case, you need to know about the key factors affecting server speed:

• Processor (CPU) power;
• Amount of RAM;
• SSD vs. HDD;
• Software and Configuration;
• Network and Connectivity;
• SSL certificates and encryption;
• Caching and CDN (Content Delivery Network);
• Content and code optimization;
• Resource distribution.

With the help of these factors and cutting-edge tools for measuring web server speed, such as Datadog, Zabbix, LogicMonitor, and others, you should be able to pick a server that would perform well for you.

Uptime Reliability

Uptime is the measure of time during which a computer has been working and available to users. In contrast, downtime is the time during which the computer has been continuously disabled. It’s basically an indicator of system reliability. And the golden (though difficult to achieve) industry standard is 99.999% uptime. However, not all workloads require achieving the perfect availability, which is why the three-nines (99.9%) is a good benchmark, meaning that there is only a 0.1% of time that your server might be down or unavailable.

How does it matter for SEO, you may wonder? The server uptime is basically the uptime of your website, so the higher it is, the more available your site will be to users at all times.

Your site’s uptime greatly affects your user experience. Obviously, visitors won’t want to come back to a site that’s occasionally down. On top of that, uptime is one of the signals search engines use to assess websites’ reliability. So the higher your uptime, the higher you can rank in SERPs, which is why picking a hosting provider with 99.9% uptime is a must for search engine optimization.

To make the right choice, carefully study and assess different providers’ guarantees. Consider and compare their uptimes to pick the one with the highest availability. Also, you should continuously monitor your site’s uptime using tools like UptimeRobot, Pingdom, and similar to detect and address uptime issues quickly.

Server Location and CDNs

The location of your server greatly affects the performance and speed of your site. When it’s situated close to your target users, this reduces latency. Responsively, the server can respond quicker, and your pages will load faster, resulting in more satisfied visitors and higher rankings.

So, how do you make a weighted choice based on server location? It’s quite easy if you take an informed approach:

1. Research your target audience to understand their geographics.
2. Consider analyzing your competitors’ audience to get a more comprehensive outlook on who you are trying to reach.
3. Detect the largest prospects group based on their locations.
4. Pick the top web hosting service based on your needs and select a server that’s closest to the majority of your prospects.

Apart from server location, you should consider the possibility of implementing a CDN with your service. A CDN is basically a network of proxy servers and their data centers distributed across different geographical areas for maximum coverage. It enables you to ensure optimal site performance for users across different locations by ensuring that there will always be a server close to them.

While many providers allow integrations with CDNs, not all of them do, and this might be the reason for poor performance. Hence, when picking an optimal solution that’s good for SEO and rankings, opt for services that have plans that integrate with CDNs.

Security Features

The role of site security is hard to undervalue today when there are plenty of digital threats. By ensuring optimal security, you can protect your users’ personal and sensitive data, which will improve the overall user experience and trust. Also, all-rounded security signals search engines that your site is reliable and trustworthy, encouraging them to rank it higher.

The core security features that should be implemented for maximum trust include:

• SSL certificates are there for encryption purposes. They secure the connection between your server and visitors’ browsers, ensuring that hackers can pick up no information transmitted between them.
• Regular malware scans enable hosts to prevent sites from getting infected with malware.
• A firewall is an additional layer of protection that acts as a barrier between the server and a user and filters all incoming and outgoing traffic.

When looking for your hosting provider, ensure they implement security best practices including the ones mentioned above and others.

Scalability and Resources

The scalability of web hosting directly affects the amount of traffic it can process without hindering speed and performance. Needless to say, it’s important for SEO to have a scalable service that can handle increasing organic traffic that comes from search engines as you gain results from your optimization strategy.

To achieve optimal performance and scalability, it’s crucial to match your needs to the right hosting type. There are four types to consider:

• Shared hosting – Shared hosting is an environment in which you share server resources with other sites. The primary benefit of shared hosting is its relatively low price. However, it’s important to note that such environments might be too overcrowded to offer you sufficient performance and load time.
• Cloud hosting – This type uses multiple interconnected servers simultaneously for optimal resource distribution and enhanced scalability. It’s a good pick for fast speed, reliability, and performance.
• Dedicated hosting – This type of service implies that you will receive a physical server that will be dedicated solely to you. It can provide fast page load times and outstanding performance for high-traffic sites.
• Virtual private server (VPS) – A VPS creates a virtual environment in which you gain access to individual, dedicated server resources. Since it serves as your private server, VPS gives you more control over configurations and offers more consistent performance, as well as more opportunities for scaling.

Technical Support

No matter how meticulously you select your service provider, it’s important to understand that issues happen even with the best and most popular web hosts. Downtimes, data breaches, backup failures – these and other challenges can appear out of the blue and cause quite a lot of distress and potential problems that might hinder your SEO and overall trustworthiness. And that’s why you need a provider that offers all-rounded technical support that will help you answer your questions and solve any problems in a timely manner.

There are a few ways to check the quality of technical support in your potential service provider. First of all, you can check customer reviews to assess the overall satisfaction and experiences people get with a particular solution.

Also, you can test the reliability of support yourself. Study the provider’s support guarantees – it should make its support available 24/7 to ensure you get instant assistance when you need it. If possible, you can talk to support representatives before selecting a particular service to assess how knowledgeable, responsive, and friendly they are.

Pricing and Value for Money

Last but not least, you should consider the financial side of the matter to select a good hosting for you. Due to a huge variety of options, there are services for different budgets. To make the right choice, you need to determine the budget you have and compare different services to evaluate their costs and match them to your needs.

The most important point here is to look for the best value for money rather than for a cheap price tag. For the best performance, you want to find a balance of cost, features, and performance. 

Additionally, depending on the type of hosting you select, there might be some hidden charges to watch out for. Most often, services define fixed data caps that limit the amount of data that can transfer through your site, exceeding which might lead to overcharges. Be sure to check your options’ pricing policies meticulously to be aware of potential hidden charges in advance.

Tips for Migrating to a New Hosting Provider

Now that you know about different types of services, as well as the primary factors to consider when selecting the best one, it’s time when you might realize that your old solution isn’t working for you anymore. For example, it’s possible that you used WordPress hosting before, which is great for beginners, but now need to pick something more comprehensive to grow your site.

Whether due to limited speed, scalability limits, or other changed needs of your site, if you decide to switch from one provider to another, it will be quite a lot of work to do this right without affecting your current performance and SEO. Here are a few tips that should help:

1. Select a reliable provider who matches your needs.
2. Create an entire site backup and download it to retain all content, themes, plugins, etc.
3. Backup and download your database.
4. Move the database and all files to a new provider.
5. Retain your domain name and point it to a new web hosting.
6. Update your Domain Name System (DNS) records so that they point to a new provider.
7. Set up 301 redirects to ensure that users will get to the right pages if you change URLs.
8. Test to ensure there are no mistakes and continuously monitor your performance and key SEO metrics to explore problems and address them timely.

Summary

A solid web hosting means a world to your site’s performance and user experience. As you now know, it also greatly affects the position you take in SERPs. So one way or another, you need to pick the best service that matches your needs and objectives.

The key factors used to determine the quality of web hosting include:

• Server location and speed;
• CDNs compatibility;
• Uptime guarantees;
• Security features;
• Technical support;
• Price.

Use the tips we shared with you here to assess your options and make the right choice that will let you ensure optimal speed and performance that will let you achieve and retain high positions in SERPs and achieve your business goals without hassle.