March 16th, 2010 by Susie

This blog is intended to offer advice primarily for those starting out from scratch, but it might also be useful for readers with existing sites. As your search engine optimization strategy starts to take effect and traffic to your website traffic increases, you may find that your old near-100% site uptime takes a dive. If that happens, have a serious chat with your hosting company or find a new one altogether.

The hosting company is the one that actually gives your website the server space to operate on the net. It doesn’t need to be near you or even in the same country- more about that later- but it does need to be reliable. There are a few must have services not all hosting companies provide which will make all the difference to your online business and thus your SEO campaign. It is worth spending a bit of money with a better hosting company than going for the cheapest possible. Think of it like choosing a shop location. The warehouse just by the river might be cheap, but it could be cheap because it floods all the time.

After you’ve registered a domain name with an ICANN accredited provider, it’s time to go looking for a host. For SEO purposes it’s better to go for one in the same country as your primary business. You get a little local prioritisation in Google search rankings, for a start. That applies even when users do not specific a location, although of course they might. Some directories will only list sites hosted in the same country and it makes SEO link building a touch more difficult if your site isn’t. It’s not the top level domain that counts (the .co.uk or .com) but the geographical location of the website’s host. The only major reason for a website to host offshore is if it holds adult content, participates in copywrited file sharing, or engages in activities of questionable legality under UK or EU regulations. The latter, or what the search engines might think of as the suggestion of it, is not good for SEO either.

What to look for in a hosting company? There are two primary concerns. One is guaranteed uptime. Cheap and nasty hosting companies will cram too many websites into not enough space, causing server overload and your website to vanish into an error message til the problem is fixed. Good hosting companies will happily guarantee 96% uptime or more. The other is ease of update. To keep your website fresh and your SEO strategy in action, new content needs to go up regularly. Plan how this is to be done. The hosting company should help you, not discourage you from updating frequently.

Ask what other websites the company hosts and check how good they are. Some might be listed on the host’s own website, which is usually a good sign. Find out what level of monitoring they have and how much out of hours support they do. If your website falls over in at 2am on Sunday morning, you still want it fixed in the next hour. Especially for those doing business internationally. You might want to start with a cheaper shared hosting package, and that will be fine for most, as long as you choose the right company. Really big websites getting a lot of traffic usually go for a dedicated hosting package, but don’t worry too much about that. You can always move to one if you need to when the time comes.

The important thing to remember is to always get a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is a contract between you and the hosting company that states what service you can expect and usually gives a lower limit to the percentage of uptime you can expect. It might also place a financial penalty on the host if they go over that limit.  Having reliable web hosting is a vital part of running a successful SEO campaign and reaping the rewards. Your search engine optimization could have been implemented flawlessly, but if your site is down when a visitor goes to use it, you’ll find that you won’t be making the return on your investment that you should.