High-quality hosting has everything to do with search engine rankings. Since the beginning of search engine optimization as a practice by amateurs and professionals alike, there has always been a discussion regarding what kind of neighborhood ( hosting environment) in which your website resides. The thought at that time was that your website should be hosted on a server that was considered a good neighborhood. By good neighborhood early SEO specialists were implying that your website should not be hosted on the same server with spammy websites , defamatory websites, pornographic websites, copyright infringing websites or any other type of low quality website.
Today Google has even directly stated that not only should your website be hosted in a good neighborhood, but that the speed of your server may impact your rankings in their search results. Google has long stated that their primary goal was to give their users ( searchers) the best user experience. Part of the user’s experience is the time the searcher has to wait for their search results to appear in the search result pages. The next step is the time required for your page to load after the blue link in Google’s results has been clicked. Google has stated that faster loading pages make for better user experience. They factor in the response time of your server, compared to the response time of competitive websites in your market, when determining how all relevant websites will rank.
Research for yourself on the internet, many pundits have stated that 57-80% of your visitors will use the back button on their browsers and abandon your web page if it doesn’t load within 4-8 seconds. I’m one of those that will be gone; I can use the back button and click on the next search result much faster.
Not all hosting environments are equal. The nature of the hosting business, is the fact that most hosting control panels will accomodate an unlimited number of accounts, independent of the actual space used by each account. This allows companies focused on hosting activities to over-sell their servers. They’re able to do this and promise new customers unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, knowing full well that the average customer will in reality use little of each. What over- selling does is allow the hosting companies to maximize their profit from each server, even though each client uses only at a small portion of the server’s resources. Consider that thousands of websites may be hosted on one server, and you can easily understand why their servers are kept working at or near capacity. This will often cause delays at the most critical time: when your web pages are called.
