Can Shared Hosting Hurt Your SEO Rankings?

Submitted by: kenwood893

A shared hosting account is a hosting account where you have full access to your files and database through an administrative interface and share server resources with other website. The amount of disk space and RAM are allocated to each hosting account, but usually in small amounts. The average website has little in the way of bandwidth or server space requirements, so shared hosting plans tend to have very little actual memory and allocated disk space. Shared hosting plans are also very cheap, ranging from as little as $2.99 per month to $9.99 per month. These plans are made for websites that do not have a lot of visitors and that run lightweight CMS or static html files. In many people's minds, hosting is hosting - but that is not the case. Your hosting account has everything to do with your website files system security, database security, backups, reliability, performance under load (with lots of visitors) and overall speed.

It is important that all the systems that support your hosting account stay up to date and secure such as apache, mysql, and other platforms. One major hosting company is using a version of apache that is over 8 years old, even though multiple versions and security upgrades have been available for years. But how can your hosting account have an effect on your SEO rankings? In Google's Caffeine update, they added website speed and performance as a ranking factor for their search results. This means that along with on-site relevance factors, link network, and other SEO factors, your website speed can affect your ranking. Slow websites will loose position to faster sites with all other factors remaining constant.

What does this mean for you? Your hosting account matters. When you are selecting a hosting company, it is important to match your hosting plan with your website needs, and make sure you have scalability. You should be able to increase your disk space, memory, and performance based on your website's needs, but more importantly, you should start with a hosting plan that is what your website needs. E-commerce websites are among the most needy when talking about disk space and memory usage. Many people still run e-commerce websites on shared hosting plans, which can not only decrease performance, but it can jeopardize security. Even websites with larger content management systems will drag on a shared hosting account, so be very selective in choosing an account that will meet your needs.

How do you know what is right for you? Ask your developer. Find out what your website will need to perform at optimum levels and find a hosting provider that matches those needs. Also consider the impact of any website marketing and increasing visitors over time. VPS or virtual private servers can be a good fit since in many cases you can create a "slice" of a server with the memory and disk space you need. The added cost of a good hosting account is very insignificant when you look at all the factors of security, speed, reliability, SEO, and peace of mind.