One of the major factors that contribute to running a successful website is having the right hosting plan. Many website owners believe that web hosting is as simple as choosing a package that suits their needs and paying the monthly fees. In reality it’s much more than this. The hosting service provider and plan you choose can affect your site’s ranking. This fact is often overlooked and many website owners discover too late that a problem with their hosting was the cause for a drop in ranking. Some of the web hosting problems that can negatively affect your website’s SEO include the following.
Downtime
Many hosting companies promise 99% uptime for websites they host. While this is great, you must keep in mind the likelihood of the 1% downtime actually occurring. Downtime simply means that your website is unavailable until the host’s servers are up again. It also means two things. First, site visitors cannot access the site. Second and even worse, search engine bots cannot crawl the site. To search engines, your website is virtually invisible and they simply assume that it has been removed from the server.
If the downtime lasts just a couple of minutes or hours, it cannot have much effect on your SEO. However, if it lasts for days search engines are likely to drop your site from their index. Once the site is up again, it will have to start at the bottom of the ranking hierarchy and it can take days to months before it regains its former position.
Exhausting the Allocated Bandwidth
If your hosting company provides unlimited bandwidth, it’s always good to make sure that this claim is true. The good thing about having unlimited bandwidth is that your site will be easily accessible even if the number of visitors increases suddenly. If however your hosting plan includes unlimited bandwidth, your site might become inaccessible once the bandwidth has been exhausted. Results similar to those of your website’s server going offline are very likely
Slow Loading Times
How fast a website loads has been one of the ranking factors used by search engines. If your site is hosted on a slow server, most of your optimization efforts will mostly be futile. Some of the server issues which might slow down your site include the following.
First, your site might use software which isn’t installed on the server on which it’s hosted for example a database management software. This means that in order to load your site, the server needs to access the software from another server making the load time even longer.
Second, the hardware on the server might also slow down load time. In particular, the type of disk drives used to store the websites can easily determine whether web pages are loaded fast or not.
Finally, having your site hosted with others on the same server can also slow it down. A server hosting more high traffic sites tends to slow down especially if there are numerous calls being made to it to serve up web pages. It’s often advisable to go for a dedicated server if you can afford it.