Business Website Hosting is one of the most important factors to consider if you want to build an online presence and another communication channel for your business, but equally important is SEO, because even the best business website hosting won’t do much if you have poor or no visibility on search engines.

Does Website Hosting Affect SEO?

Contrary to common belief, the web host you choose does play into your SEO strategy. Technically, choosing the right hosting company is not a 100% guarantee that you’ll be getting a boost in search engine rankings, but at the very least it means you can avoid the consequences of being saddled with a poor host. Make no mistake about it, a bad web hosting company will do a lot of damage to your search rankings, due to the following reasons:

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Site Loading Speeds

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Google has already publicly admitted that the loading speed of a website factors in when their search engine ranks websites, on the basis that users will most likely not appreciate being sent to sites that take a long time to load. Remember that a search engine’s job is to point users to websites that they want, and an unresponsive website doesn’t exactly meet the criteria, relevant content or not. (more…)

Major universities usually provide free student web hosting for individuals enrolled in their institutions. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this, as it’s free. But students will eventually find out that the hosting is so limited that there’s really nothing useful to do with it.

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Limitations for Student Hosting

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Limited Bandwidth

For starters, it’s usually hosted on school servers alongside other students’ sites, so bandwidth is definitely not in abundance.

Limited Content

Additionally, the universities have very strict policies on what you can put in them, so you can’t have full control over your content. If you want true free student web hosting, you have to strike out on your own and build your site using third party services.

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Disadvantages

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Losing Your Contents

Once you graduate, your free account goes away. Your content goes away. Yes, you may always save it in the cloud but that would mean uploading everything again. (more…)

It’s understandable that budget web hosting can be appealing to webmasters who want to make a profit online, especially because web hosting is a recurring expense for their business. But there is a caveat – budget web hosting can actually affect a website’s search engine rankings.

There’s nothing really alarming as the effects are nowhere near as bad as being outright flagged and “Google-slapped,” but people who want to make the most out of their websites when it comes to exposure should keep in mind that budget web hosting will affect your SEO efforts through the following things:

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Page Speed

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One of the things that cheap web hosts usually skimp on is bandwidth. They either throttle or shape the bandwidth of their servers, resulting in slow page loading, especially now that the size of files on the web has gone up. Unfortunately, speed has become an even more important factor for people especially as more and more of them have gotten high bandwidth Internet accounts. According to studies, 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

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When it comes to SEO, webmasters tend to focus too much on in-page optimization that they forget that the domain host itself is a factor, and a powerful one at that. In fact, having a good domain host and choosing the right domain name will usually give you a running start, as far as getting decent search engine placements for your pages is concerned.

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First Things First: Why You Need a Top Level Domain Name

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Back in the late 90s, when the Internet was still young, having a top-level domain name is not important and in fact, webmasters enjoyed using a subdomain, as cliques tend to form and they use umbrella domains to house different sites. However, a few years later (or a decade later), subdomains started being seen as amateurish, as a webmaster’s lack of investment on his own domain name signify a lack of commitment. This prompted ad networks to reject sites that don’t have their own domain name, which further snowballed into webmasters themselves considering subdomains to be useless (mainly because of the belief that you can’t make money off them).

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This brings us to today, where having your own domain name is pretty much a requisite if you want your website to be taken seriously, and most especially if you want your website to be profitable. However, simply having a domain name is not enough if you want to be visible on search engine results. (more…)

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bgarry/

All the marketing, branding, and promotional strategy in the world will not be worth anything if your site is frequently inaccessible because you failed to get reliable web hosting when you started. So if you’re serious about creating an online presence, you need to hit the ground running, and the first thing you need to consider is getting reliable web hosting.

It can be very difficult as the reliability of cannot be quantified using numbers, and claims from the companies themselves should be taken with a grain of salt. So if you’re on the market for reliable web hosting and you don’t know where to start, you may want to follow these tips:

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Weed Out the Obvious Liars

If something is too good to be true, it usually is. This include sites that promise 100% uptime. A 100% uptime is virtually impossible, as servers need some downtime due to regular updates, patching of software, and maintenance – that’s not even counting the fact that accidents can happen. The best that providers can shoot for is 99.9%. In fact, even 99.99% is suspicious. It is best to look at these uptime guarantees with a suspicious eye, and to use them as jumping off point for the other tips below.

Click here to learn more about the built-in features of Prestige Technologies that other web hosting companies charge more for.

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It’s common knowledge that web hosting is one of the most important investments you’ll have to make if you are serious about building a presence on the Internet, but the truth is that the best free web hosting solutions out there will be enough for you if you’re just starting out, or if you’re not really planning to start a website that will have millions of daily visitors. Additionally, the best free web hosting solutions usually give you an out, or the option to migrate to a better paid service if your needs start to grow beyond a free host’s capabilities.

The Importance of Investing in a Domain Name

There’s no getting around this. If you have long term plans for your online presence, or if you don’t want to waste your time trying to build a following and a traffic stream everytime you move to a different host. With your own domain name, you can simply point it to any free web host (or at least use a url redirect) and you’ll never have to worry about policy changes or a free host going out of business.

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