4 Fundamental Features To Consider For An SEO Website Hosting Provider

Competition for online customers is heated up and every business is trying to make their website more appealing and fulfilling to the customer, in-order to attract traffic to them.

Most organizations and individuals as well are heavily investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their websites, as a key driver of traffic to the sites. However, it would be a great loss for organizations to invest so much money in SEO, only for their efforts to go down the drain where their hosting packages do not support or water down the optimizations done. So, the question begs- does hosting affect SEO? Do hosting + SEO marry up?

There are some key features that must be considered in deciding your hosting packages and provider, and these will enable you to maintain the optimizations done. These key features include;

1. Speed and responsiveness

A deal breaker for Google as well as other search engines is sluggish and non-responsive websites. A slow responding website will never climb up the search engine result pages (SERPs), and to make it worse still, they are a huge turn off to the clients who access them, due to their poor user experience.

The hosting provider must be able to provide optimization for speed on his part, as well as have measures and checks in place that will guide their hosting clients in optimizing their sites for speed and responsiveness.

2.  Allocated servers

A great impact to the speed and accessibility of your website will be the servers that are hosting your website. Shared server resources are okay, but can be prone to overloads and speed limitations, especially where you are sharing the resources with resource intensive neighbors. This can completely ground your website in some critical instances.

However, you can opt to use VPNs (Virtual Private Servers)-still shared, but you are guaranteed allocation of server resources, or better still host your websites in a dedicated server, just for you-although these options are costlier than shared servers.

3.  Availability and reliability

Irrespective of how fast and optimized your website or hosting provider is, it is all useless if they are inaccessible, and consistent unavailability will be an SEO penalty if it persists. To mitigate this, it is important you review the uptime scales that your hosting provider is giving you, and you can go further to verify this through user reviews e.g. hostgator user reviews.

Today, most hosting operators will easily give you up to 99% uptime, but high competition has even pushed most of them to go higher to offer 99.9% uptime. The more the uptime scale, the more reliable the hosting provider is and this in turn means that your website will be available and accessible throughout.

4.  Security

Attacks, compromises and hacks are on the rise in recent times. A less secure hosting package or provider will raise the probability and frequency of attacks or hacks on your site and each time it happens your SEO ranking definitely goes down. If the attacks persist, your website is dropped from the ranking.

You therefore need comprehensive review of the security of the provider, and more so, find out if there are past attacks that have been launched on the hosting provider platforms and how many of these have been successful. This will help you to know how secure the platform is.

The most encouraging thing is, most of the hosting providers have metrics and analytical tools which you can use to evaluate and analyze the various features. Some even give you a free trial period for you to try out their services, before you commit to using their hosting packages.