A good ranking on a search engine can make a big difference in the success of your website. The higher it appears on search engines, the more traffic you can drive to your site. Understandably, a lot of people spent a great deal of time trying to optimize their websites for search engines. One area that is often overlooked is the choice of web hosting.

Here are some ways that your web hosting can negatively affect your search engine ranking if you are not careful:

Negative Effects Of Web Hosting

Making sure that your service provider supports the right programming languages is an issue if you are trying to optimize your website for search engines. Proper coding can help you reduce the size of the content on your website while preserving its usefulness intact.

Similarly, the right programming language can help you optimize certain features of your website easier than others. If your service provider does not support that particular programming language, then you’ll either have to work around that restriction or give it up as a lost cause.

IP Address

If you are used shared web hosting rather than either VPS or dedicated hosting, you’ll be sharing an IP address with all of the other websites on the same server. Although sharing an IP address with other websites is not a problem as far as search engines are concerned, you can run into problems if you find yourself sharing a server with a large number of low-quality websites of suspicious origin and dubious purpose. Specifically, your problem isn’t that you are going to be penalized in your ranking because you are doing something wrong, but that there is a higher chance of you being identified as belonging to a link farm and treated as such.

Loading Speed

The speed at which your website loads for a visitor plays an important role in determining its search engine ranking. In turn, the speed at which your website loads is determined by the size of the page being loaded, the geographic location of your server relative to that of your visitor, and the computing resources that your server is able to use to service the request made by your visitor. If your server is swamped with too many service requests and slows to a crawl because of it, your website’s speed will fall and its search engine ranking will suffer as a result. Getting more CPU resources to service your website will solve this problem, particularly if you aren’t sharing with other websites stored on the same server.

Server Location

Search engines such as Google assign a country to your website based on the geographic location of the server that services it. This is important because a website that is in the same country as an user submitting relevant search phrases is going to be ranked higher than a website in another country. Although this might not be particularly important if your website is trying to reach out to a global audience, it can play an influential role in the degree of success of your website if you are interested mainly in attracting a local audience.

Shared Hosting Dangers

Although your service provider will do its best to keep its servers free of malware, even the best service provider cannot possibly account for all vectors of infection. If you are using a shared hosting option and one of the websites on your server becomes infected with malware, that malware can quickly spread to your website because each website stored on that server is not keep separate from one another. A website infected with malware will suffer any number of issues depending on the specific malware, each of which is potentially crippling. Although your search engine ranking may not be the utmost priority on your mind if someone has hacked into your website using malware and made off with your customers’ information, Google and other search engines can and will act to protect their users by either penalizing or even removing your ranking outright.

Making sure that your website is up and available for use 24 hours a day and 7 days a week is key to climbing the search engine rankings and remaining at the heights. If the search engines crawl your website and it is either slow or simply unresponsive at the moment, that unavailability will impact your website’s search engine ranking negatively. You’ll need to choose your service provider if you want to avoid such issues. Although no service provider can guarantee that your website will be up all of the time, a service provider that is prompt about updating its software and acting on security threats is much less likely to see its servers go down than the competitors. In contrast, if you go to a service provider that crams large numbers of websites on the same server in a blind and thoughtless search for profit, then your website is much more likely to go down when that server either crashes or slows to a crawl.

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Thank you to my Guest Post Author: Neil Hilden

Neil wrote this guest post on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com – Find out more information about their hosting reviews. Neil is a freelance writer and his articles mainly appear on search engine marketing blogs.
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