The web host influences your business in a number of ways. Though some of these affects are quite blatantly obvious, there are others that are not so obvious and are in fact overlooked. ‘Site ranking’ is one such thing that is affected by the web hosting service that hosts your website. Let’s see how.
Your site’s ranking is based on the perception of your site by the search engines. A lot of people/businesses use a number of techniques (and spend a lot of money) to enhance the ranking of their websites. Most of these techniques fall under the purview of what is known as “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). The search engines constantly monitor your site using web spiders and keep adjusting your site’s rank based on a number of criteria. It goes without saying that the first thing that the web spiders check is the existence of the website (everyday, there are a whole lot of websites/online-businesses that shut down their operations). If the website doesn’t exist anymore, its ranking is sure to come down. If your website is down at the time the web spiders visit it, it’s as good as your website not existing at all (this is what the web spiders will record). If this happens more than once, the damage will be even more severe. Hence, the server uptime is important even from the perspective of your site ranking. Do not go for a web host that offers less than 99.9% server uptime.
Moreover, if your web hosting server is not available at all times, updating the website or performing site maintenance will become a frustrating, time consuming and tiresome job for you. Again, you might be updating the site for the purpose of enhancing your site’s ranking and if the web server is down it’s effectively hampering your SEO efforts (and hence your ranking too).This further accentuates the need and importance of doing a good research on web hosts before actually selecting one.
However, you are faced with another challenge here i.e. can you have faith in the claims made by the web hosting service provider (e.g. claims of 99.999% uptime etc)?
Such decisions are quite vital to the success of business. In business, you can’t really have faith in anyone without any reason. The best way to handle this challenge is to check with others who have been using that web host. The reviews of the web host will provide a much clearer picture about the truth behind the claims. Don’t look at just one or two reviews; look at scores of them (http://www.webhostingreviewdirectory.com is one such place which has several reviews - consolidated from several resources on the internet).
