Does hosting has an impact on SEO?
When you organise a party for your friends, you are the host of that party. In simpler terms, hosting is a service provided by the organiser. However, web hosting is nothing different than this. Web hosting is the service of making your website available on the internet, to be viewed by a larger audience. A web host provides space to that website on the server connected to the internet. Now, a server is a computer-like device that stores all your files to share on a larger scale. While you try every primary SEO tactic to rank your website higher in the search engine result pages, you should not forget the role played by the hosting for the same.
Earlier this time, Google did not have rigid rules for the hosting providers, but now the era and rules have changed. Although the keywords, content, and relevancy still are the primary factors for Google to rank your website on the first page, the host of the website in nevertheless important too. But how? How does hosting affect the ranking of a website?
1. The speed of the server
Who likes a slow loading website? No one, not even Google! While the geographical location of a host doesn’t affect the ranking of the website in a significant way, but it does affect. If your website is targeted for the Indian market and your host server is located in the United Kingdom, then it is definite that your website will load a little slower. While the files will take some extra time to load as it will be transferred from a different region to a different one, the loading speed of your website will be affected.
2. Location of the server
Just as we travel to different cities of a state, we pass through some checkpoints while changing our location. Similarly, when files travel from a different geographical location, they pass through checkpoints too. These checkpoints are called firewalls. However, most of the countries have their laws and orders to penalise the websites hosted by other countries. The firewall security does not allow unauthorised data to travel into their region. So if your hosting server is located in a different country which doesn’t allow it to reach the targeted audience, then the ranking of your website will undoubtedly be affected.
3. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the limit of data transfer provided by the hosting provider between the website, and the user. The hosting companies provide the maximum level of bandwidth for the website to transfer the data to a larger audience. A larger bandwidth will allow the users to download a large amount of data from your website, and resulting in a significantly faster transfer of files from one location to another. A website hosted in Hong Kong will load much faster in London with a higher bandwidth as compared to a lower level of bandwidth. Thus, the optimised speed of your website will help you rank your website higher.
4. IP address
There are two types of IP addresses, Dedicated and shared IP address. A dedicated IP address is solely dedicated to one single website, whereas, a shared IP address is allocated to two and more websites. When you decide to get a shared hosting service for your website, your website is provided with a shared IP address, which can directly lower the ranking of your website. With a unique C-class IP address, a search engine can quickly crawl your website and rank it higher in the result page. However, if a spammy website has a shared IP address, then the rest of the websites will face the consequences of the penalised website too.
5. Domain name server
With shared hosting comes same domain name server (DNS), and there is no better way to lower your ranking on the search engine result page than shared hosting or same DNS. When your website has the same domain name server as of another website, the crawler might rank that website higher in the results for a query. Unique DNS will boost your ranking as the crawler will only show your website for the related query. Additionally, unique DNS will also help with the backlinking process as an off-page SEO practice. Different domain name server will land the user on the respective link of the page, whereas a shared DNS might confuse the crawler and take the user to a different website.
6. Security socket layer (SSL)
How often have you come across a website, that says ‘secure’ before the URL? A secured website builds the trust of the search engine and the user that the content and the data is encrypted. An encrypted data is prevented for unauthorised access by converting it into a code. A secured and trusted hosting of a website boosts the ranking on the result page. There are different types of SSL to secure your website from unauthorised access of the data, which are :
Positive SSL is the type of SSL which says ‘https’ (hypertext transfer protocol secure) before the domain name.
Wildcard SSL is the type where a website has subdomains, and a single SSL secures all the subdomains of the website.
Extended Validation SSL, which displays the secured name of the corporation with https before the URL.
Multi-domain SSL is for those who have multiple websites to secure and encrypt the code through the same SSL.
Therefore, hosting do has an impact on the optimisation of a website to rank it higher in the search engine result pages.
