If you are like most website owners, you probably haven’t put too much thought into the relationship that lies between shared web hosting and how it could negatively affect your site’s search engine rankings. But, unless you choose among some of the best web hosting providers (Bluehost and Inmotion, for example) you might find yourself killing your site’s online “reputation”.
But, let’s not jump the gun. Let us start with the definition of the two terms:
Shared Web Hosting: This is a kind of hosting that is offered by providers where a number of their clients’ websites share a single server. Depending on the plan the clients have opted for, their sites also share the servers’ resources (disk space, bandwidth, IP address, etc.).
Search Engine Rankings: When search engines list websites in their search engine result pages (SERPs), they appear in a sequence that is determined on factors like originality, frequency of updating and relevance of their content. The website’s popularity and uptime also factor in its ranking.
But, as we will see next, there is a direct relationship between your website’s shared web hosting and its search engine rankings.
Here’s how:
Increased Downtime: Your website could find itself crashing more often than you would care for due to no fault of yours. One website with malfunctioning scripts could be responsible for the crashing of the server that your website resides on. Now, the chances of such errors occurring increase as the number of websites that share your server rises, and this could hit your search rankings because of two main reasons.
First, visitors to your site might abandon you if your website is offline one too many times. It just looks unprofessional. Second, search engines use bots that “crawl” your page to gather information about them. If they can’t find your website, you will lose ranking due to lack of sufficient information or indexing.
Increased Crawl Time: As mentioned above, search engines send out bots to gather information about websites. The “crawling”, as the process it known, has a limit in place in order to stop it from going on forever. This limit is based on time per site or IP address: the bots work for a certain amount of time per server address and/or website.
Now, if there are hundreds of websites hosted on a server, the bots will obviously be very busy. If they do manage to reach your site (after going through many, bigger sites) you will be lucky to have a delayed indexing of any changes you’ve made. If not, your site might be entirely skipped because of the bots timing-out.
Page Loading Time: One factor that determines a website’s ranking is its loading time. The faster a website’s pages load, the higher rank it is given. If there are too many websites sharing a server, and especially there are busy and popular ones among them, your website’s page loading time could be severely affected as bandwidth and processing speed/power is taken away from it.
Shared IP Addresses: When multiple websites are placed on a single server they are assigned the same IP address – that of the server itself. Now, if even one website among your fellow clients is used for spamming or malicious attacks, hosts on the internet will blacklist the IP address or, worse, totally block it. This means, because of the spamming website that happens to be sharing a server with your site, you will pay the penalty. Your visitors will not be able to access your site and search engines will register it as a spam site – killing its online reputation and sending its ranking into a nosedive.
Increased Security Threats: Another reason your website could crash is due to the lax security in one of the websites that share your server. Hackers may gain access to a website and then use it to cross over to your site or even bring down the whole server, again impacting your uptime.
Tarnished Reputation: There are websites that offer clients detailed information about hosting servers and the sites that reside on them.
If you happen to run a business that can’t afford any ill repute, you might find yourself surprised to be listed among spam, malware, porn and illegal software, as well as media-sharing sites. This again drives away visitors and hence affects site rankings.
But, more importantly, when search engines “look” at your IP address they will see that your website (however clean and legal its purpose and content) is among those kinds of “undesirable” sites and rank it accordingly – poorly, needless to say.
So, now that we have seen the effects of shared webhosting, let us look at three things you can do to help prevent or totally alleviate the problem:
- If you can afford it, opt for a dedicated server.
- If you can’t, then at the very least invest in a dedicated IP address.
- Choose a webhosting provider that has a good reputation in the industry.
