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Low cost hosting (or even free hosting) may sound good but you have to be
careful. A hosting provider that overloads their servers with too many hosting
accounts can offer lower cost hosting but their servers are congested and this
can mean trouble for your website.
Also, low cost providers may display ads on your website that bring in revenue
to the hosting provider. These ads are a way to make up the difference between
what the hosting cost are and the hosting fees the provider is receiving from
you. These ads act as a subsidy for the low costs for hosting your website.
However, the ads take away from your website and message.
The low cost providers may not be doing a comprehensive backup of your website
on a daily basis. This is one of the ways that they can save money. To do backups
less frequently saves them money but can put you at risk if you need a current
(prior 24 hours) backup of your site.
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Another way an inexpensive hosting provider can save money is to use a low
bandwidth connection to the Internet. Bandwidth is a measure of how much data
can be received and delivered through a connection. If the connection is a low
bandwidth connection then your site may load slowly. Some of your potential
customers may think that the site will not load at all and give up. Also, if
there is high usage on a crowded server with a low bandwidth connection then
all the sites will slow down. This will happen even if the high usage is not
associated with traffic on your site. The traffic could be on another site on
the same server and your site will slow down or appear to be unavailable. If
Google visits during a time when your site is operating slowly or unavailable
then Google may hold this as a mark against your site and you may drop in position.
A good hosting provider will also have hardware such as firewalls, load-balancing circuits,
uninterruptable power supplies and multiple paths to the Internet for additional bandwidth
to further protect and maintain the hosting environment.
Another good idea is to select a hosting provider that can offer you a dedicated IP address.
The inexpensive providers may not offer this service and a dedicated IP address can provide
you with more control of your hosting environment and help you with your search engine
positioning. A dedicated IP address may cost a bit more but it will be worth it if you
need an extra boost in the search engines.
Advice:
- Select a high quality hosting provider and be willing to pay for it.
- Talk to your web developer to determine if a dedicated IP address is
appropriate for your website.
- Select a provider that does daily back-ups of your website.
- Host in an environment that does not overload its servers.
- Select a provider that has reliable high-speed connection from the servers
to the Internet.
- Work with a web developer that also offers hosting. This way the web development
service and the hosting service will work nicely together.
- Don't take your hosting environment for granted it can have a big impact on your
search engine position and on the quality of the experience for your visitors.
Next Step:
If you would like Website Link Tactics to help you to get links into your website
that are keyword-based and embedded in paragraphs with text related to your
business then give us a call.
We will be happy to discuss how linking can help boost up your position in the
search engines and help to drive targeted traffic to your website.
Also, you can simply fill out the form on our Inquiry Page and we will get back to
you shortly.
Printable Version: Search Engine Placement and Hosting (PDF).
