You may have the best website in the world, but without good website hosting your website visitors will have a poor experience. Website hosting ensures that the files which make up your website (code, images etc.) are visible online. When you purchase a hosting plan, you are renting space on a physical server to store all your website’s files and data. Poor website hosting can negatively impact the performance of your website, as well as how well your website is ranked on Google.
The Impact of Web Hosting on SEO
When choosing a reliable website hosting provider, two things to make sure they prioritise are a high percentage of guaranteed uptime, and quick loading times. There is no point in spending all that time optimising your website for both the user and search engines if your website then doesn’t load in 3 seconds. Traffic will simply go elsewhere and not bother waiting for your site to load.
A few other SEO benefits of good website hosting include:
- Security – having an SSL certificate and a low percentage of downtime will improve how your site is ranked. If your website is regularly down, this will affect how the crawlers can crawl and index your website.
- Performance – user behaviour is a ranking factor for Google. If your website has a high bounce rate due to visitors regularly leaving, this will negatively impact your rankings.
- Location – search engines use location-based signals when searching for websites, so if your business is based in the UK then a UK-based data centre is important. A good website hosting provider will ensure your website is hosted locally.
Benefits of A Good Website Hosting Company
High-speed hosting
To provide a good user experience and maintain a low bounce rate, fast page load times are essential. If visitors are struggling to access your website, sales are going to drop. Not to mention the fact that Google will not rank your website well if it is slow to load. A good website hosting company will ensure you have high loading speed with the right bandwidth for the number of visitors that access your website on a regular basis.
Downtime alerts
Your website should be automatically monitored by your website hosting company, so if anything happens you will be alerted immediately. This includes issues with the server, the website crashing, issues with fluctuating traffic and more. A reputable website hosting company will act quickly on the alerts, and get in touch with you to update you on the progress of their fixes.
Dedicated servers
Some website hosting companies host several websites on one server in order to save costs. However, if one website suddenly gets a surge in traffic, this will cause the other websites on the same server to slow down. It is also important that the neighbouring websites have high credibility otherwise this could negatively affect your search engine rankings. A good website hosting professional will provide dedicated servers where you won’t have to share with anyone else.
Regular backups
Any website hosting provider should provide regular backups of both your website and your data, so this can be easily retrieved in the case your website becomes unavailable. There may be times where you require an additional, manual backup, and your website hosting provider should be able to accommodate this.
High security
Security of your website is incredibly important to reduce the risk of it coming under attack by hackers. Regular scans should be performed to ensure that your website’s defences remain strong and data is protected. Just like with the downtime alerts, your website hosting provider should detect any issues as soon as they arise and fix them efficiently.
Fast response times
Should anything happen to your website, a reputable website hosting provider should resolve any issues in a professional, timely manner. It may be that you are allocated a dedicated account manager, or you might have to raise a support ticket which is then allocated to the best expert within the team. Out-of-hours support should also be provided as your website needs to be live both day and night, particularly if you are running an e-commerce business.
Choosing The Right Website Hosting Provider
At DBS Digital, our dedicated website servers are hosted in the UK, and contain solid state drives. This means that in the eventuality that one drive fails, the others will continue to function – meaning your website won’t go offline at all. With frequent website monitoring, firewall protection and site protection, your website will be safe, secure and have fast load times if you choose us. Head over to our website to find out more about our website hosting services.
