Author: Tom Cottrill | Date Posted: May 10, 2022
Part of your work as an SEO professional is obviously about making sure your clients’ websites are in tip-top shape in all the ways that matter for both the user experience and the search engines. When you’re evaluating all the parts of a website that matter for these aspects of SEO, one very important piece of the puzzle is where a website is hosted. When most companies are having websites built, they don’t even put much thought into hosting since it’s a behind-the-scenes part of the operation that doesn’t affect them much aside from who they’re paying monthly to house their site. So, does it really matter where your clients’ websites are hosted, or is this just one of the parts of having a website built that can go either way without much consequence? What are the types of hosting service? Let’s dive into it a bit further to help you decide for yourself.
Web hosting is the space on a web server where space is allocated to essentially hold a website. It is the housing for a website. Without a host, a website has nowhere to live. Hosting allows a website to display code, images, content, etc.
A variety of types of hosting service exist. The type of hosting depends on what kind of technology the server uses, the level of management provided, and any additional services. The types of website hosting are:
Basically, some types of hosting service allow for flexibility depending on how much traffic your site has, how technical the user is, how much control you need over the server, and how much control you need over the hardware and software.
Website hosting allows all files that make up a website to be uploaded from a local computer to a web server. All the server’s resources are then allocated to the website using it. Sometimes the server’s resources are divided quite a bit, and other times they are dedicated just to one website.
A comparison we see used often is to that of office space: do you want to share your workspace with other workers inside of a co-working space probably for cheaper, or do you want to have your own office that is private for all the clients and employees you have coming and going? If you have a large company with a lot of traffic, you probably need your own office space. If you are a solopreneur who takes meetings by phone, you probably would be just fine in a co-working space. A web server is similar. The more traffic you have on your site, the more dedicated a server you need.
You might be asking the question, or maybe your clients are, but chances are, someone is wondering why web hosting matters for a website. The types of hosting service matter for your site as well. It’s a good question. The answer is that website hosting affects many aspects of the website’s function, user experience, search engine optimization, and frankly quite a bit of the website process.
One major metric for measuring website performance, into which Google places the utmost importance, is site load speed. Because users typically bounce from a webpage within just 2 to 3 seconds, making sure a website is quick and loads within that 2 to 3 second window is crucial. Part of this is how a website is built, and multiple factors play into it, but a large part of it is where the site is hosted. When a site visitor is closer to a datacenter, it will load faster for them, so hosting services that offer many datacenters or are local to your service area are preferable.
Some sources, and a lot of evidence, show that server location is used as a ranking factor for search engines, so if a website says the company is located in Ohio but has an IP address in Europe, there is strong evidence to support that this will hurt your search engine rankings. At the very least, it’s important to make sure that your clients’ IP address and server are within the same country. Your hosting company will be able to confirm this information for you if you don’t know for sure.
Another important ranking factor is website security, but it’s also really important for your visitors and even to you so you don’t have a website security issue one day that causes you to lose your website, rankings, content, and even visitor information such as form data or payment information.
A website must be secured in multiple ways, one of which is having a secure host. It’s beneficial if accounts are isolated from one another so malware cannot spread to other sites on the server, and good hosting services also have regular monitoring to make sure any attacks are stopped before it happens and run regular malware scans. While a site should have a security audit done on the site itself, these scans on the server are crucial too. Make sure you avoid hackers and site break-ins by having a good host.
A good host ensures that a website is reliable for when visitors go to it. If a visitor clicks on your website, and the server is constantly down—or even if it is just down one time for an extended period of time—you will lose those potential customers. This could result in tens of thousands of dollars lost when you consider the money that client would bring in plus anyone they would refer. When the website doesn’t work, you end up with frustrated people who entirely give up on it and move on to your competitors.
Backing up your website regularly will help ensure that if a hack does somehow get through, your database goes down, or some other unmentionable thing happens to your site and breaks it, it will be able to be restored to working order quickly. If a site isn’t backed up regularly, the last backup may be outdated and require multiple updates and a lot of lost content, comments, data, and anything else that has been added to your site recently. This is a lot of time and money wasted, so it’s important that if something does happen to your site, it can be restored to the backed up version in a matter of seconds.
Going back to the office space analogy, if you know your business is going to be growing quickly, you’ll want to plan for a bigger office space into which your company can grow. If you are trying to grow within a co-working space, it will get crowded quickly and could waste you a lot of money when you’re behind the curve now trying to catch up with your growing company.
A website host is the same. Your traffic for your site will increase over time, but if it is doing so in a way that requires you to be consistently increasing your hosting plan in a way that phases you out of your current host because they won’t be able to handle the amount of traffic you have coming in (if, for example, your client goes on Shark Tank one day and expects a huge influx of traffic from that point forward but isn’t prepared for it), and your site could crash and lose all those potential sales that were coming to your site.
Since 2013, Ignitro Studios has been working to blend marketing and technology in support of agencies and other marketers. By understanding both sides of web development, we have a unique perspective and advantage within the industry. We provide design, development, project management, QA, and strategy, driving the bus so our clients don’t have to. We will work with our clients to get results while also empowering them to do their job better. Learn more about Ignitro Studios.
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