It doesn’t often pay to be cheap.  Especially when it comes to web hosting.  Part of Google’s ranking formula is the load time and speed of your site.  Also, if your web site seems to be on a hosting roller coaster, up, then down, up then down, etc., your search engine rankings could be suffering as well.  If Google comes to crawl your web site and nobody’s home, (site is down) then it’s off of your web site and on to the next for the Googlebot.

Slow speeds and downtime can be a direct effect of:

- Hosting companies jamming their shared servers FULL of web sites, the more sites on the box, the more taxing it is on the server to deliver the requested web site.

- Hacking attempts.  Trust me, hacking attempts are made daily on web hosts, if a hacker gets control of a server, they can wreak havoc on the web sites on that box.  If the hacker inserts malicious code into your web site, Google WILL typically display a message saying that visiting a web site could harm your computer.  Not good.

- Non updated software.  In order to stay ahead of hackers, your web site server needs to be updated regularly with the most current patches / software, etc..

- Slow and outdated equipment.  You don’t necessarily need the latest and the greatest, but, site load time and speed are also directly proportionate to the amount of memory and drive space that a web server has. From my experience, memory (RAM) on a server is one of the keys to a quick load. I recommend at least 4 megs of RAM.

- A poorly optimized web site.  This is not directly tied to the web host (unless they built your web site) but more to the designer.  If your web site is jammed full of HIGH res images, long movies, poorly written code, etc., the site will of course be much more prone to load slowly. The more optimized your web site is for speed, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

The bottom line is this.  The quality of your web hosting is an integral part of your online presence and can affect your search engine presence dramatically. Pay attention to how quickly your web site loads and be sure to let your host know of any issues you may encounter. The host could actually move your web site to a newer box, a box with less traffic, etc..

We get asked this question quite a bit: Does Switching Hosting Affect Your SEO efforts? The short answer is NO. The long answer is Yes:

Here’s why: IF you move from one hosting company to another and find your web site in a shared hosting environment (you share a server with a couple of hundred other web sites) and their are known spammers of malware types on that shared box, you could be placing your own web site rankings in jeopardy.  Google is ‘trained’ to seek out and eliminate known search engine spammers as well as malware or malicious code type web sites.  As a result, they also record the IP address of the host and guilt by associate could be the end result.

A host may not know that there are known spammers on their box until they start getting complaints, so it is best to do some due diligence prior to switching hosts.  Google the hosting company and make sure you don’t see any comments or complaints from past victims.

Believe it or not, your web hosting can have an effect on your google or organic search engine rankings.  The main reason: stability.  If your web host is constantly crashing or going down and bots keep trying to access your web site and get 404 errors, they may stop coming back, thus, not picking up new web content, site updates, etc.  Ultimately, you can lose a great deal of momentum in the organic search engine listings.

Another issue to consider: is your site sitting on a ‘box’ or server with questionable characters? Are there known search engine spammers on the shared hosting box server? Google does read IP addresses from web sites it visits and you could have a guilt by association situation if there is a known spammer with the same IP address.

A simple rule of thumb here: you get what you pay for.  Paying 19 cents a month for web hosting may not be the answer. Find a company that has been around for a while and that seems to cater to more ‘business’ oriented markets. 

To all of our valued clients: at approximately 3:24 we experienced a momentary loss of connectivity with our malia server.  She was rebooted and is now back in the loop.  None of our other servers were affected. 

As always, we will keep you posted.

Many of our clients get nervous when it’s time to transfer their web site in house: rightly so: their website is typically their lifeline to their clients and new prospects.  I think many have had horrendous experiences with transferring a site in the past, this is how we do it:

1.) If we are building a new web site for a client, we setup a hosting account on one of our web servers including all email addresses etc., that the client will need once the DNS (domain name system) is transferred to our name-servers (name-servers are assigned to a web hosting server to identify it.)

2.) If the client is simply transferring an existing website to our servers, we take this approach: We obtain FTP access to their existing web site host, download their site locally, and then setup a hosting account on our web server.  We then upload those files (from the previous site) to the new account we have created.  We then have the ability to see the web site on a temp URL to make certain that everything is functioning as it currently is with the existing host. Once we have kicked the tires and ran the web site through QC, we inform the client that we are ready to ‘point’ their domain to our name-servers.

3.) The client / or us (if requested) go into the client’s registrar’s account (where you registered your domain name initially) and change the existing name servers to point to our web servers.  This only takes a few minutes and once submitted through the registrar, it can take up to 48 hours until the domain is actually sitting on our server.  We’ve seen web sites on our servers within 10 minutes of switching, but have also seen it take up to 2 full days to ‘settle in’.

4.) The main objective is for the switchover to be seamless: this is why we upload the existing site PRIOR to switching the DNS.  Oftentimes our client will not even notice a difference or notice when the ‘switch’ has occurred.

5.) Some minor changes on the client’s end: We really try to make everything as simple as humanly possible for our valued clients, but there is one adjustment many of them need to make once the site has switched over and that is their outlook email settings: We send the client detailed instructions on how to edit their existing email settings and obviously are available to walk them through the relatively simple process.

We understand that some of this can be daunting, but we’re here to help.