Three ways that unreliable servers can affect your SEO efforts

Google has already made it clear that your hosting doesn’t directly affect SEO, but what most people don’t realise is that your choice of hosting can indirectly have potentially quite drastic results. This is particularly true if you are currently still on a shared server and are starting to notice some major problems. So here are ways in which your choice of hosting could be affecting your SEO.

1. Uptime vs downtime

If your hosting provider was to tell you that they offer 99% uptime, you would be pretty impressed as that sounds like an incredibly high percentage. However, in reality, this means your site will be down for roughly 7 hours every single month. That’s a problem because it can lead to people finding your site in Google but not being able to access it and clicking away. At the same time, Google bots that index your site may be restricted from getting in. If this problem happens a number of times, then Google won’t find your site responsive or trustworthy and punish you for it.

2. Bad neighbourhoods

By being on a shared server, which comes with the vast majority of cheap hosting options, you are subject to punishment if you share the server with bad websites. These sites may have been noticed by Google as untrustworthy and will punish them for it; and if you share a server, then your IP address will be linked and they can punish you as well.

3. Site speed

Similarly, with many other websites sharing a server, your site’s average load time will decrease. We also know that site load time is a particularly important Google ranking factor and they will punish you for continually slow-to-load pages. If there are a number of large sites on your server, then you may start to notice some real problems.

For these 3 reasons, many people are turning to dedicated private servers to provide better uptime for their websites. Clouvider offers exactly that, with dedicated servers in the UK, and can guarantee you 100% uptime, meaning you have nothing to fear in terms of punishments from Google. To find out more, and to see if we are the right fit for you, get in contact today.