If you’re using your website as an income generation tool, you have to ensure that there are no bottlenecks along the way. As far as SEO go, there is a lot that you can do on your site and beyond to give your site greater visibility on search engines. However, none of these efforts will mean much if you’re working with the wrong webhost.
It’s easy to see a webhosting service as nothing more than a place to rent out server space for your site. Although a good webhosting services will not do much to help your ranking, a poor webhost could hurt it.
Downtime
Uptime is a regularly quoted factor when you go shopping for a webhosting service. Uptime refers to the percentage of time that your website is available. However, it’s not when your site is available that you should worry but when it’s unavailable i.e. downtime.
The search engine ‘spiders’ will possibly try to visit your site several times on a given day. Should the spiders come during the periods of downtime, i.e. when your website is not accessible, several times, your site could get flagged as unreliable. This could cause you to tumble down the rankings.
When it comes to uptime, even 99% uptime is not adequate nowadays. Good web hosting services such as Umbrellar.NZ can guarantee at least 99.9% uptime.
Speed
Depending on the content of your website and other factors, it may take a while for your page to load on a user’s computer. However, your web host can also affect the loading speed of your site. If your webhost doesn’t have the resources to ensure your visitors can access your content fast, it could cost you in the rankings.
Google did state that the speed at which a website loads would be factored in when deciding rankings. An experiment conducted in 2013 showed that at that time, it was actually the speed of the web servers that could affect the rankings. This was because of a correlation between the Time to first byte (TTFB) and the rankings.
For this reason, you’ll want to ensure that the webhost you choose has enough bandwidth to ensure your webpage’s loading speed will not be low.
Security
If you’re planning to run an ecommerce site, then the security of your webhost’s servers is paramount. Your site will be handling critical information belonging to your customers including credit card information. As the site owner, it is your duty to ensure that your host’s servers can withstand attacks from viruses, malware and hackers. If your customers don’t have a satisfactory shopping experience, they’ll likely not return and without enough returning visitors, your rankings will suffer.
Location
The location of a server is important in determining where your website will rank in local searches. If you live in New Zealand or if your target area is New Zealand, choosing a local server such as Umbrellar may give you higher rankings than choosing a server in another country. This is especially the case since Google started using IP addresses to determine the locations of servers.