Once you decide to put your business online and get a website, your job is half done. The other half is ensuring that you find a good web hosting provider who gives you a secure, fast, and reliable platform and hosting space to host your website. Having a good web hosting facilitator that has a decent shared hosting plan that takes care of your servers and provides you fantastic uptime (99.9%), high speed, and bandwidth is absolutely essential for your business because this is what helps your page to load quickly. Google considers page speed and loading time as one of its most important factors for ranking a page/URL when it comes to SEO.
This is just one aspect that you ought to consider while choosing an SEO-friendly web hosting provider. But there are a few more things that you as a business owner should be looking at. With this article, we will understand these aspects in depth.
Tips for Choosing an SEO-Friendly Web Hosting Provider
1. High Uptime
High uptime warranties have become an even more important metric for website owners who focus on SEO. Customers demand high availability from their suppliers, for better speed and performance. Many web hosting providers offer guarantees to ensure that their customers get 24/7 service and an uptime of 99.9%. That’s maybe around 1.44 minutes of downtime daily and 8 hours for the whole year which is not a bad deal at all. A high uptime guarantee is a sign that the hosting provider or company is as serious about your business as you are.
The contract between the web host and the client is based on a certain number of hours per month, which is usually 99.99%. If the supplier does not reach this level, he must return the guarantee to the customer or refund it in any way agreed upon previously by the parties.
2. Location of Servers
Your data center network plays a key role in the loading time of your pages. A dense network of data centers for any hosting plan that you buy helps you with loading pages faster than usual. Basically, you want the data center to be as close as possible to most visitors to your site. The further your server is, the longer it will take to load your site.
Server placement can also look bad in search engines, which can affect your SEO. If you operate in one country but use a host located in the middle of the world, something bad may have happened.
It is not said that the servers themselves should also be fast and that the host should further improve performance over the content delivery network (CDN).
3. Hosting Security
When it comes to hosting, security comes first. This is because most of the information stored on our website and servers is very private and sensitive. There are many ways in which people try to endanger security. Hacking, phishing, and brute force attacks are some of the most common ways miscreants try to break the security but it is always important to have safety measures in place. To protect your business data from unauthorized people, you need to invest in a hosting service with strong security features. Apart from SSL and data recovery tools or mechanisms, ask your hosting provider if they provide virus mitigating software that can detect attacks and tackle them before anything wrong happens. Or even daily malware scanning where you understand how many attacks were prevented. This clarity is important from an SEO point of view also because Google considers user experience and safety an important measure of SEO hygiene.
Other Important Aspects
Having a good support team that responds well is an added plus when choosing a hosting company. But when it comes to SEO, a good CMS will work wonders. Ask if your provider gives WordPress as a platform to host your website. It is a proven platform for SEO success. Other than this, you can check the reviews written about your hosting provider on some well known review sites like HostAdvice or some such. This will help you make a sensible choice.
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