Things to Consider Before Buying Your Hosting Plan

“How important is my hosting for the my business to succeed online?” I must be honest. I’ve heard this hundreds of times. People who’re just trying to make it online have a hard time understanding that a well configured server and a fast response time, as well as a nicely coded website, have a much better shot at making it to the top of Google.

Content is king, but other than being able to spot great content, Google and other search engines are very good at finding mistakes. Just imagine your dedicated server has just failed on you when the Google bot was actively crawling your websites.

SEO is dependent on your website. Not only on how you optimise it, but also on it being available every time.

Therefore, there are a few things you should consider/monitor.

Website monitoring

Having a good idea regarding the availability of your website (the response code), the performance of the server (load) and the speed load time (response speed) is a great first step. These are the three main elements that you need to monitor to make sure that things are running smooth. So before choosing your hosting company search online for reviews and make sure that others have had good results being hosted there.

Also, you should know that there are a few tools you could use:

• Pingdom — offers a free service that monitors the availability and response time of your website
• Server Density — paid service that offers a lot more alerts (and graphs, too)

Server Location

If you’re wondering if  the server location will affect your local search rankings, you should know that it does. Having a website and looking to grow in the UK market, it’s only natural that you’ll go for a .co.uk domain name and a hosting company with servers located in the UK.

Just think of it. When the average user goes on Google from the UK, they are likely going to be redirected to Google.co.uk, hence, they’ll see more pages hosted in the UK because they rank higher over pages hosted in the US (or India, or whatever). It’s a good idea to know your market niche so that you can find a server locally — sometimes, this gives you a little edge against competition.

Shared, VPS, Dedicated or Cloud?

There’s no secret recipe regarding what hosting plan you should get, but depending how big your business is you get to choose from shared hosting, a VPS or a dedicated server, or being hosted in the cloud. What does it mean to you?

• Shared hosting: it’s cheap, affordable, but most of the time crowded making your pages slow if the hosting provider oversold your machine.
• VPS : more expensive than shared hosting but not by much, gives you a bit more room and allows for more changes on your machine;
• Dedicated servers: expensive, but unless it’s a managed server (which is, most of time, even MORE expensive) you should have a good understanding of Linux/Unix, server good practices and the likes;
• Cloud hosting: designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers, cloud computing is a set of pooled computing resources and services delivered over the web; most of the time it’s the best solution (price-results)  for  a complex business with plenty of traffic.

If you’re looking for a great hosting solution for your online business, a free marketing consultation or maybe one of our SEO services, then don’t hesitate to contact us.