How does your hosting service affect your search engine rankings? There are lots of cut and paste articles which discuss this, written by people who have English as a second language (not a crime, just a readability thing), but no real data. So I decided to check it out for myself.
The perils of poor hosting. These seem to be threefold. A site that is up and down like a whore’s drawers is not going to be popular with people, not just search engines. A site that is slow is likewise annoying. And if your site is on the same host as some dubious spamalot adult sites, then it may get blocked by various internet policemen.
Now it may be politically and technically incorrect to just talk about google, rather than search engines in general, but you know what I mean. I’m more of a Search Engine Pessimist whose glass is half empty and besides, Search Engine Optimists are ten a penny.
Being a man of many sites, some of which are largely experimental (though one of which really did help me earn $12,000 this year – note I said “help me earn”, rather than “earn me” – big difference), I put some of them on a cheap $1 a month hosting service. After a few years of sticking it out, I decided to find out how many other sites were hosted on the same web server as mine. Too many sites means unpredictable performance.
It turns out there were just under 1000. Which sounds like a lot to me, some of them being adult in nature. So it certainly couldn’t hurt to host at the same place as this site – which has only 17 sites on the same server, none of which you’d be ashamed to tell your mother about.
The proof is in the pudding, so I’m going to have to wait until google notices my server change and see what the impacts on the number of visitors I get are. I’ll post the results here.