A large number of webmasters and SEOs often agree that the condition of your web hosting can sometimes have a big influence on site performance in the SERPS. Here we discuss just a few reasons why this is likely to be true.

Reliability
You can expect a good level of reliability from the best hosting providers. Up time stats of 99.9% are often bandied around by many hosting companies, however this is not always true. There are some good unbiased reviews of web hosting companies to be found, but nothing quite compares to contacting sites who have already chosen the hosting and see what they think about reliability. Or perhaps you might want to look at cloud computing and relax secure in the knowledge that your website will be able to manage all eventualities, as cloud computing companies “explode” their servers to continually supply adequate bandwidth.

If your site has high levels of accessibility, the search engines will be free to pick up any new articles or content you publish quickly. Further more it gives search engines confidence that if they display your site in their search results, users will be able to view it no problem. It would harm the search engine’s reputation if they kept sending people to sites that were down, so make sure you stay in their good books.

Speed
Not only are search engine spiders impatient and wont hang around on a slow site, but again search engines are reluctant to direct their users to poorly performing sites. Now that some of the biggest search engines have altered their ranking algorithms to include site speed, its time you sat up and paid attention to yours. There are a number of tools that you can use to monitor site speed, but Google’s own Webmaster Tools provides some pretty good virtualization data on how your site has been performing over a number of months.

Good Neighbourhood
Not many people consider the other sites hosted on their shared hosting, but believe it or not their reputation can have a real influence on yours. If you are on the same hosting server as a site that sends out spam emails, hosts malware or is engaged in unscrupulous link building activities, you could find yourself with a bad rep also. Always make sure you do a reverse IP lookup on your hosting to see what other sites you share with. Take some time to look at the profiles of the these sites sharing your hosting and don’t be scared to speak up or leave if everything doesn’t look Rosey.