Choosing the right hosting, part 1
When it comes to choosing a hosting solution for your website, it is important to consider several key aspects. Beyond the obvious factors such as price and size of the hosting space, it is also crucial to consider the impact of hosting on your site’s SEO. In this article, we’ll take a close look at these important points to consider when choosing a hosting company.
1. Server performance:
The speed and reliability of the server are essential elements for the referencing of your site. Search engines are placing increasing importance on page load speed. Choose a web host that offers fast, high-performance servers to ensure an optimal user experience and better search rankings.
How to evaluate the performance of a hosting server?
2. Server location:
The geographical location of your server can also influence your SEO. If your site primarily targets an audience in a specific region, it is best to opt for hosting with servers in that region. This can contribute to faster load times and better relevance to local users.
3. Security:
Security is a crucial aspect for any website. A reliable hosting company should offer strong security measures, such as firewalls, SSL certificates and regular backups. Search engines pay special attention to website security, and secure hosting can have a positive impact on your SEO.
4. Availability and uptime:
Your site must be available to users at all times. Choose a hosting company that offers a high availability guarantee (99.9% or more) and optimal uptime. Frequent interruptions can hurt your search engine rankings and discourage visitors.
5. Scalability:
The ability of your hosting to scale is important to your site’s future growth. Check to see if the hosting company offers scalable hosting plans, with the ability to upgrade to higher packages as your site grows. Easy scalability will save you technical hassle and ensure a seamless user experience.
Case Study
Some very well known hosting companies, such as GoDaddy, BlueHost and others offer very good prices (for the first year), a robust and always available technical support but the choice of the location of the servers is limited to one geographical location per continent. It is therefore not possible to know exactly where the servers are other than to choose North America or Europe, for example. If you are in Montreal and your server is in Texas or Arizona, the extra milliseconds it takes for the server to respond will impact your SEO.
Additionally, GoDaddy turned to offering email in partnership with Office 365 because their servers were overused to send spam from the company’s inception. As a result, the free mailboxes offered by GoDaddy are marked as fraudulent by most of the world’s servers and only 1 in 3 emails (on average) will reach their destination, not having been rejected by the receiving server.
You also have to be careful with hosting companies with offers that are too good to be true, such as WHC. Despite the company’s assurances about security, reliability and the promise of external backups, this company had 5 of its 12 servers hacked in 2021 and lost the entire data of hundreds or thousands of companies. The data was therefore not kept in a safe, external location.
We hear stories like this every month in the business. That’s why choosing the best web hosting is essential to ensure the success of your site. In addition to the obvious aspects such as price and storage space, consider server performance, server location, security, availability, uptime and scalability. Don’t forget that these factors also have an impact on your site’s SEO. By making informed hosting choices, you can provide an optimal user experience, improve your search engine rankings and help your website grow.
If you are a Quebec-based company offering local (not international) services, your best option is a hosting service such as Likuid, for example, which offers local services, on servers located in Montreal and Laval, with accessible and qualified customer service offering solutions to all your needs.
Choosing the right web hosting is essential to ensure the success of your site. In addition to the obvious aspects such as price and storage space, consider server performance, server location, security, availability, uptime and scalability. Don’t forget that these factors also have an impact on your site’s SEO. By making informed hosting choices, you can provide an optimal user experience, improve your search engine rankings and help your website grow.