Are you wondering what kind of hosting package to choose for your business’s website? Well, there’s a lot more to consider than a handful of customer reviews and a comparison to see who offers the cheapest package.

There are a few things that can affect your business’s SEO performance, so consider the following points before finalising your choice of hosting.

>See also: Small businesses struggle to grasp full potential of SEO

Security

The first thing to impact SEO performance where hosting is concerned is security. If your site isn’t secure, you risk your website being hacked. If this happens your rankings can drop in Google and other prominent search engines, which is bad news not just for now, but for the long term too – it can be very hard to regain rankings in search engines if you find your website dropping further and further down the pages.

So, a hosting package that requires you to manage the security of your server yourself might not be a good idea unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Spend the money on a host that can manage security for you if you’re in any doubt at all.

Location

The next thing you need to think about is your location. While there’s no hard and fast evidence for it adversely affecting your business’s SEO performance, there is some correlation between a ‘.co.uk’ website and a ‘.com’ website competing for a high position.

>See also: How to create a global SEO strategy

This can occur if you have two equal websites (one in the UK and one in the US) when you’re trying to rank highly on Google UK. The site hosted on a .co.uk domain is likely to rank a bit better.

However, it’s the physical location of the server you’re using as part of your hosting package that will perhaps make the biggest impact to your business’s SEO performance where performance is concerned. Simply put, the closer your server is to the location your users are based in, the faster your website will be to load. The faster your website loads, the better your SEO performance will be – so do give some thought to server locations.

Speed

The speed delivered in the hosting package you choose will also have an impact on your business’s SEO performance. That’s because the more allocated bandwidth and RAM your package allows for, the faster your website is likely to be (a high server processing capability is important too).

That means that dedicated servers are likely to perform better so far as SEO is concerned in relation to hosting choices.

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However, there’s no concrete evidence that Google will penalise you if you choose shared hosting as opposed to private dedicated hosting, purely on the basis of your hosting type.

But choosing a cheap hosting option can lead to poor SEO performance in the indirect ways seen above, which means that hosting does have at least some affect on your business’s SEO performance. As a result, it’s important you’re choosing the right type of hosting from a host that’s reliable, affordable and available when you need them for support, such as Midphase. Without this, your website’s SEO performance could suffer unnecessarily.

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