In the competitive world of search engine optimization, website owners tend to focus on their on-page SEO and off-page techniques ignoring that what importance the web hosting provider has for their website. While it is certainly true that good web hosting does not boost your ranking in search engines, a bad web host can cause your website to be penalized. Imagine what will happen if a visitor gets server error while visiting your page or the page timeouts? Obviously, without a second thought, he will switch to another website from the thousands of options available on Google.

In fact, making a decision to choose a web hosting company now is beyond the consideration of disk storage and bandwidth, and you have to consider several other factors as well. So, you have to be very careful when choosing the right web-hosting provider.

In this article, we have rounded up everything from high uptime score to customer feedback, to help you decide the right hosting service provider for you.

Unstable and weak servers or network connections may push your site offline. Therefore, choosing a web hosting company with high uptime (or the percentage of time that your site remains online and accessible) is quite important. The higher the uptime, the more potential visitors on your site. What’s more, search engines are known to penalize websites that do not show reliable uptime.

For the best experience, look for the hosting provider with, at least or above, 99.99% uptime; the key to your site’s ranking success as it faces merely 1.44minutes or even less downtime, in one month. However, reliable uptime must be guaranteed; otherwise, if visitors discover your site is down, they will be back to search engines, risking your search engine ranking and reputation.

The server location is quite an important factor while considering a web hosting company. The reliability and quick accessibility of website depends on the server location of hosting company. As long as the data center is located close to the majority of your website visitors, the loading time will be fast; otherwise, it can cause unnecessary delays while your site loads. If your hosting provider has VPS, shared or dedicated server hosting plan, your site will be live on a physical server as compared to cloud hosting which results in data to house in the cloud.

Server location or IP address is significant for SEO as well because Google’s Algorithms examine IP addresses to take into account the country of the server. Always choose a host located near to your country; otherwise, it may affect your SEO.

Is the hosting company effective and immediate in providing technical assistance? Always look for a hosting service with fast and active live support available 24/7. Prioritizing the provider with live chat support and social media visibility is always good opposed to tickets and email communication. Companies with in-house customer support departments tend to fare better than those that are using outsourced customer support services.

Web hosting companies have a lot of other features and function more than merely providing web hosting services. Look for the value add-in services provided by web hosting company that may help your site upgrade. Some of the prominent and SEO-friendly add-ins you may consider are:

Often ignored, you must check for the customer feedback while deciding a hosting company. Compare the reviews of various hosting providers to make sure which one has the highest customer satisfaction and positive feedback.
With the advent of the internet, checking for customer’s reviews is quite easy to do. See what the online reviews are telling about the host provider?

• Does it offer multiple servers? Don’t risk your site’s protection.
• What Google tools it has along with site search, Adwords and Sitemap?
• What scalability does it offer to customize your website?
• Is it mobile-phone supported?
• Does it support various languages like PHP, ASP and JSP?
• What bonus features it offers?
• The limit of Bandwidth and Storage.

After having a detailed overview of a good web hosting provider, it won’t be difficult for you to decide the right hosting company for you. However, make sure to adopt a comprehensive approach to analyze and identify the right web host for the optimal functioning of your site.

Pauline Jacobs (born 1996) is a freelance researcher and a content writer. Her interests revolve around contemporary sociology, cutting-edge technology, and journals on the algorithmic rise of computing. She is a current contributor to Hello Digital Marketing blogs and contents.