Free vs. Paid Web Hosting: The Impact For Your Project SEO
When improving website SEO, many focus on keywords, domain names, and web design, but forget that web hosting also makes an impact. Hosting has more impact than just making your website available. When utilized right, you can rely on your hosting to lighten the SEO workload for you.
This article will explain how web hosting impacts your SEO project, what to look for when choosing a business web hosting, and what SEO techniques will help you succeed. We will also compare between free versus paid hosting to help you make the best decision for your needs.
How Web Hosting Impacts SEO
First, let’s dive more in-depth on the impact of hosting as it helps you decide which type of hosting that works best for you.
Getting your website to rank high on a search engine result page — or SERP — requires work. From choosing the domain name to using relevant keywords, everything must be SEO-friendly. Hosting helps make your website top-notch, like increasing traffic, conversion rate, and make you stand out from competitors.
For further understanding of how hosting helps with SEO, we highlighted these three reasons.
Speed Matters
Website speed is a significant factor for SEO as it affects your website ranking. When a website has low speed, Google automatically puts your website nowhere near the first result page. You can avoid this by selecting the hosting with high speed.
Many providers offer hosting plans, capable of handling different amounts of traffic with high speed that impacts SEO. In addition, you can also test your web host’s speed to know how much you have and need to improve on.
Data Center Locations
A data center is a dedicated space to store vital data, information, and the physical servers on which your website resides. Data centers are used by many and relied on for daily operations.
When picking your hosting provider, make sure that it includes a strategic location. It’s essential to have your data center location be as close to your target audience as possible. Closer locations help your hosting work more efficiently.
Uptime Is Essential
Website downtime has an extremely negative impact on SEO. Search engines automatically mark your website unreliable when it detects a downtime, thus lowering your website ranking.
Visitors also lose interest if your website loads longer than the acceptable time range, from 0.8 to 2.9 seconds.
Most hosting providers guarantee 99.9% of uptime, and it’s the minimum of what your website should have. Prevent downtime by carefully selecting your hosting plan. It also helps when you regularly monitor your downtime to understand how it fluctuates and lets you avoid downtime.
Paid vs Free Web Hosting – What’s the Difference?
Now that you know how impactful hosting is to SEO, let’s take a look at free and paid hosting and the differences between the two.
Free Host
Free hosting plans are usually targeted to beginners, small businesses, or for testing purposes with significant limitations. They will only focus on getting the website active rather than working to improve SEO. There are four reasons why free hosting is an ineffective choice for your SEO strategies.
Allows for fewer resources and reliability. As free hosting targets people with a small audience, it will offer fewer resources and won’t be as reliable. There are numerous limitations on free hosting, such as limited bandwidth, customer support, tools, maintenance.
Fewer data centers. With fewer options for data center locations, this leads to slower loading time or even making your website inaccessible. It will also be more challenging to resolve issues if there are fewer data centers within your proximity.
More potential service outages. Most hosting providers prioritize the paid hosting plans with higher uptime guarantee compared to the free plans. With the already fewer resources in free hosting, it increases the chances of downtime.
Unable to use your own domain. This limitation on domain names will further reduce your website’s SEO and ranking. Free hosting only offers a subdomain name. It means your domain name is an extension of the host provider’s website rather than a website on its own.
Paid Host
The price you pay for paid hosting is an investment that’s worth the money. Paid hosting is targeted for medium to large businesses with capabilities to accommodate large data processing. Here are four reasons why paid host is a must for your SEO strategies.
You get your custom domain. Getting a custom domain name adds to your SEO, especially if you benefit from specific keywords. It also means that your website stands on its own, allowing search engines to recognize and rank it better.
Have greater control and more resources. Paid host includes more features to adjust its purposes, and this means more control and resources. You get the benefits of added customer support, licensed security, and more management on the website elements.
Less likely to experience downtime. There are far fewer limitations on paid host, and you can enjoy the benefits of SEO tools to help increase your website ranking. Hosting providers typically include plugins that help with SEO.
Access to premium SEO tools. You can enjoy the benefits of SEO tools to help increase your website ranking. Hosting providers typically include plugins that help with SEO.
Conclusion
Adding impact to your website SEO is a long process. However, the right web hosting can help you. These two web hosting types are mainly compared together, free, and paid host.
Both free and paid hosting have their pros and cons. Free web hosting works perfect for first-time users or experiments without the worries of losing money. Paid host works for larger businesses or target audiences, with benefits that can improve your website SEO.
Luckily, there are many affordable hosting plans with various prices that you can choose. The key is adjusting your needs with the host options available. We recommend choosing paid web hosting because it’s effective for your website SEO.
We hope this article helps you create better SEO strategies for your website.
This article was published in collaboration with Mary Derosa. Mary is a founder and chief editor at her digital content and SEO agency PRable. She is passionate about digital marketing innovations. The technologies and online businesses are her engines she loves to write about.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’s disclosure policy.
