You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your website, but if you don’t take care of the hosting details, all your hard work will be wasted. Find out three things you need to know about your site’s hosting to help with your digital marketing efforts.
1. Your Site’s Hosting Can Affect Your Search Rankings
When you use a free website host, your page rank can suffer. This is because free hosts usually employ “shared hosting,” meaning multiple sites are housed on the same server and share data transferring, processing, and memory resources. When many sites compete for the same resources, one site’s good performance might decrease the other sites’ performance.
Also, free sites are more likely to be blacklisted by the major web crawlers for having poor page rank. For example, suppose your site is on shared hosting and performs poorly for a particular search term. In that case, the content of that page (and therefore your site) could appear lower in search results.
However, you can avoid this result by using a paid site hosting service. With “dedicated hosting,” which is what nearly all major hosting companies provide, your website’s performance should be much better—as it won’t have to share valuable resources with other sites. Not only will your page rank increase, but you’ll also get access to a wide range of free SEO tools that a free hosting service just doesn’t offer.
2. Your Site’s Hosting Affects User Experience
If your website is slow, has frequent downtime, or takes a long time to load, the majority of users will simply click away and leave. After all, who wants to use a site that they have to wait around for? If you want people to visit your site and stay there, you need to make sure that it loads quickly and reliably.
3. Your Site’s Hosting Affects Security
The majority of web hosts offer shared hosting—and although this is a great way to reduce costs, it can increase your site’s vulnerability to security breaches.
For example, if the server that hosts many sites gets hacked or infected with malware, your site may be affected together with all the other sites on the same server. If you want full control over your site’s security, you should opt for a dedicated or virtual server rather than shared hosting.
If you are serious about digital marketing, then take the time to find reliable web hosting that will keep your page rank high, reduce load times and increase site security. This way, you’ll stand a much better chance of success.
