Does shared web hosting affect search engine ranking?

Do you own a great website?

Have you purchased a paid web hosting plan?

Are you still reeling under the shock of poor SEO rankings?

If your answer to all the above questions is a definite yes, then read on to find out how a silent culprit can bring down your ranking without your knowledge.

Shared web hosting. The first option of many website owners to get on the internet bandwagon.

Shared hosting means that one physical server and the resources hosted on it are shared between multiple users (10+ up to 200-300). All the users share the same I.P. address. Every user is allocated a limited amount of services such as the disk space, traffic, FTP accounts etc.

But have you ever realised that it could also hinder your business success? Read on to learn how economically viable shared web hosting could actually lead to losses in the long term.

Loading speed

Loading speed is the speed at which your website loads for a visitor. Since shared hosting could potentially host hundreds of websites on a single server, too many service requests could lead to a fall in the website’s speed.

A solution worth exploring is going with VPS or dedicated server. In this case, you can use all the CPU resources efficiently and effectively without any of the above-mentioned issues.

Increased downtime of shared servers

A website that is up and running 24 hours a day and 7 days a week could well be the key to climbing search engine rankings.

Search Engine spiders make several visits to every website in a day for crawling and ranking purpose. During this visit, if a server shows error or is not accessible properly, then they move on to other sites. This will directly affect website ranking in Search Engines.

 Security issues

If you are using a shared hosting option and one of the websites on your server becomes infected with malware, it can spread to your website rapidly.

A website infected with malware will suffer from many crippling issues. While you may be worried about losing sensitive customer information, Google and other search engines can and will act to protect their users by either penalizing or going so far as to remove your ranking outright.

 IP Address and bad neighbourhood

When you are using shared web hosting rather than either VPS or dedicated hosting, you will be sharing an IP address with many websites on the same server.  This could be a problem if you are part of what Google calls a ‘bad neighbourhood’. It means that if any other website on your shared server has been flagged as a spammer, then everyone on that server (i.e. same IP address) will be affected.

To conclude, shared hosting has indirect implications on your SEO ranking. If you are unable to afford a dedicated server or VPS, the next best option is to go for a dedicated IP address on shared hosting.

Do write back and let us know if you have suffered due to shared hosting and how you tackled it. Look forward to seeing your comments below.

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