How bad Web Hosting affects your site SEO?

You always look for the on-site and
in-site optimization of the website
when trying to optimize it for the
search engines, but many overlook
one of the main factors that
determine the SEO and website
rankings a lot – Web hosting.
The web host affects the way a
search engine crawls and
determines the power of the
website. There are quite a few
things one has to keep in mind
while selecting a good web host for
their website, if they have to care for
the SEO and SERPs.
Location of the web host
One of the reasons is the Web
hosting location, as Google is one of
the main search engines which also
looks for the load time of the
website, and if the location of web
host is far enough from the IP
address of the user, the indexing is
not done properly, degrading the
value of the website.
Bad Neighbors
The SEO value of your website also
depends on the other websites
which are present on the same IP
address, when you are on a shared
hosting. When any site on the
shared server is penalized, this
affects your website too as both lie
adjacent to each other. Until you
prove that your website is a genuine
and original one, the tag of having
bad neighbors and being under the
eye would stay. The only way out
of this is to ask for multiple ID
address usage from the hosting
company, or to go for a dedicated
IP address for your website.
Downtime issues
If your website keeps disappearing
and gets server load issues
frequently, this would affect your
website value big time. As the
website is down, the search engine
robots find it hard to index the
pages and content. This not just
makes you lose the short term
traffic when the site is down, but the
long term traffic from search
engines is too lost as the content is
not well indexed, affecting the
rankings in search results pages.
Upgradation of hosting
software
Usually the hosting software gets
the updates regularly, and just like
the computer tools, the updates are
necessary as the performance of the
website is highly affected if the
timely updates are not carried out.
Sticking to the old software when a
new version is released works two-
fold against the website.
Server load speed
Most of the SEOs experimented on
this, and claimed that one of the
factors in the ranking algorithm of
the search engines, is the speed of
the server and the speed with which
the website loads. Making a visitor
wait for long till the page loads, is
not accepted by the search engines.
Of the two pages with content of
almost similar value, the search
engines consider the faster load
speed website as the better one.
Spending loads of budget on the
traffic and promotion, and then not
considering putting some efforts
and good budget for hosting is a
common mistake by the
webmasters, and the entire
promotion and SEO strategies go
into vain.
Banned IP addresses
Many a times, unknowingly you
buy the hosting from the cheap
hosting companies and they try to
sell you the hosting in IP addresses
which were previously banned in
search engines. You may not be
aware of this fact, so it’s better to
check for the reliability of the host
before selecting one, when you
have a list of those who sell it well
under the budget.
Error pages
Don’t forget to make a 503 error
page, so that once the host is down
any time the website shows a status
of being temporarily unavailable, or
by default the web host would
show a 404 error page which
removes the entire page from the
search index, as the 404 error
indicates the search engines that the
page no longer exists.
When spending, just don’t spend
something by blindly trusting the
web hosts. You can be spoofed
anywhere. Check for the reliability of
the host, and spend a little more to
buy a dedicated IP for your website
and avoid any risks caused due to
neighboring websites.