What Is Website Hosting?
Site hosting refers to services allowing businesses and digital marketers to save relevant files (e.g., images, code, scripts, etc.) and publish their websites. In essence, website hosting companies rent out space on their web servers to you.
Website hosting is essentially managing your website files on a host computer that allows users to access your files.
Once your website files are uploaded and published on these servers, they can be viewed by practically anyone online. When a site visitor goes to your website, their browser downloads your files and displays your website as you have designed it.
This process is made possible by web servers – powerful computers capable of connecting web users with your published site. Your website hosting services include the space allocated for your site’s files, connectivity, file protection and other related services required to publish and maintain your website.
With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that getting the best website hosting significantly impacts your SEO strategy and performance.
How Poor Website Hosting Can Impact Your SEO Performance
With the Google Page Experience update having rolled out in August 2021, a poor hosting service can undermine your SEO efforts now more than ever. Looking at its potential adverse effects, you will notice most of them have to do with user experience (UX).
1. Slow Loading Times
Website speed refers to how fast (or slow) site pages load on browsers. Unfortunately, cheap hosting solutions usually have low bandwidths and could increase page loading time. This lag could frustrate users and cause them to bounce off your page, signaling to Google that your site is not worth ranking.
This lag can sometimes be due to servers hosting too many websites. Unfortunately, the best website hosting companies won’t allow too many sites to get hosted together on one server.
If you want to avoid lags, try static website hosting or maybe a self hosting website. Note that these options are best suited to smaller websites with fewer than five pages.
2. Server Downtimes
An offline or unavailable website is worse than a slow site. Imagine one of your customers going to your eCommerce store to buy something important and finding that it’s temporarily down, unable to serve shoppers what they need when they need it.
This failure to serve shoppers increases your website’s bounce rate, or the percentage of users leaving your website after visiting one page, and, worse, causes you to lose customers and sales opportunities. In addition, Google will drive your ranking down if your site experiences significant downtimes.
3. Hosting Space Shared With Unscrupulous Owners
Today’s best website hosting companies won’t allow scammers and spammers as clients – but low-cost hosting providers do. Shared hosting or hosting multiple websites on a shared server means you are compromising the hosting quality and your site security.
A shared host has two main disadvantages: First, it increases the risk of data theft or loss since you could be sharing the server with dodgy sites. Second, it diminishes your ranking and authority, as well as site speed and reliability.
For these reasons, Google tends to de-prioritize websites hosted on these shared servers. So steer clear of this cost-cutting practice.
4. Internal Server Errors
In the event of an internal server error, browsers are having trouble trying to access your site’s files. This means your site is experiencing database connection issues. It happens when your site’s content becomes viral: There are too many people trying to access your content, and your hosting provider can’t handle the large volume of connection requests
