Search ranking has become the Holy Grail for everyone investing in the web. Landing in position zero on Google is a genuine quest. The promise is enticing: with a few simple keywords, a site can become visible across the web. Inbound strategy, SEO optimization and the building of semantic silos absorb all the attention — and the community manager is supposedly the sole architect of search ranking. Wrongly so.
Producing quality editorial content is the sine qua non condition for visibility on the web. But in IT, success always depends on alchemy between software and hardware. Why bother polishing your web copy if your pages don’t load? Choosing good hosting is just as decisive as creating content and must be part of your digital strategy.
Why does hosting affect search ranking?
While Google’s spiders scrutinize words, page responsiveness is also a criterion for the Mountain View giant. Since 2010, Google has decided to penalize sites that load too slowly. Between two pieces of content of equivalent quality, Google prioritizes displaying the one that visitors can access the fastest.
Worse: with several billion pages to crawl every day, Google’s robots have no time to waste. When the first page of a site is too slow, they ignore the rest. More than ever, the choice of hosting is a guarantee of visibility.
The different hosting options
Choosing often means settling on a compromise. As a technical decision, the right choice comes down to a balance of cost versus performance. Three solutions can solve this equation.
Shared hosting
This is the solution people turn to most readily: inexpensive and offered by a plethora of providers. The principle: you share the server — and its resources (processor, memory, disk space, bandwidth) — with other sites. You are not the system administrator, and if a neighboring site consumes a lot of resources, you may be penalized for it.
The Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A VPS comes close to a dedicated server: it corresponds to the virtual portion of a physical server. Unlike shared hosting, you have full control over your system and a whole range of tools to optimize it. Performance is better — provided you have some technical grounding to configure it properly.
Dedicated server hosting
A physical machine made available to a single user, all of whose resources are allocated to a single site. This is the most powerful solution, but also the most expensive. In return, it ensures maximum performance in the service of loading your pages and keeping your site accessible.
Shared, VPS or dedicated server: which to choose?
No solution is inherently good or bad. The right choice will take into account your needs and the type of your site. In many cases, shared hosting is enough — there’s no point opting for a dedicated server for a low-traffic showcase site. The sensitivity of your data may justify a VPS, for greater control. Finally, dedicated hosting remains the most suitable solution for high-traffic e-commerce sites, where security is paramount.
Need advice on the right hosting for your project? Let’s talk.