How Does Cloud Hosting Supplement Your SEO Efforts?
Cloud Hosting is a type of web hosting where the data of your website is stored across multiple servers. In other words, your website draws its storage resources from multiple servers. This architecture is fundamentally different from other types of hosting services. In Shared, VPS, and Dedicated Hosting, all your data is stored in one server. There may be backups elsewhere, but the main copy is always stored in one place.
In Cloud Hosting, the primary copy of the data resides in multiple servers. This type of architecture brings several advantages to your website. From speed and performance to greater reliability, Cloud Web Hosting is fast becoming a popular choice for businesses.
One more reason which makes Cloud Hosting popular is the effect it has on the hosted site’s SEO. So what is SEO? How does Cloud Hosting impact the site’s SEO? Let us find out.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Moz defines SEO or Search Engine Optimisation as a collection of several steps that website owners take to increase the quantity and improve the quality of traffic to a website through organic search results. The SERP rankings on leading search engine portals like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., are one of the important factors when it comes to driving visitors to a website. These days, people concentrate on getting good SEO ranks on Yahoo and Bing as well.
To get a good SEO rank, there are several conditions that a website has to meet. It has to be safe, informative, fast, and reliable. Search engine bots, like the famous Google site crawlers, crawl through websites all the time, checking the overall performance of a website and then ranking them in its index. Scoring well on all these factors enables a website to be featured higher in the search results, and it thus drives traffic to the website.
This is where Cloud Hosting comes into the picture.
Cloud Hosting and SEO
Thanks to the architecture of Cloud Hosting, it positively impacts your SEO efforts and helps to rank your website higher in the SERP ranking.
1. Reliability
All hosting types, apart from Cloud Hosting, have one thing in common — they store data on a single server. If this server fails, your website goes down. Yes, you might have a backup, and you could use it to get your website back up again. However, this cannot happen instantly. So, your website will be down for a while. For any website, this presents two problems.
One, your potential customers cannot visit your website. This means that it’ll not only hurt your immediate chances of business but will also dent your reputation as a brand. The second problem is that of SEO.
Google, over the years, has made it very clear that it doesn’t take kindly to websites that go down often. A website that goes down regularly prevents customers from accessing your site, thereby increasing bounce rate. A bad bounce rate will result in lower SERP rankings.
With Cloud Hosting, this will not be a problem because your data doesn’t reside in one server. It’s spread across multiple servers, and if one of those servers were to stop working, chances are, you wouldn’t even notice it at first. This is because the other servers will pick up the slack, and your website will continue being up. This means that Google or any other search engine will rate your website favourably.
2. Speed and performance
The loading speed of a website is also one of search engine platforms’ criteria for indexing a website. So, better speed means better SEO. Cloud Hosting offers great speeds thanks to the fact that most providers integrate a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a caching solution with their Cloud Hosting plan. These solutions help to turbocharge your website and boost your speed.
This added performance and speed is one of the most important reasons why Cloud Hosting is gaining traction the way it is. SEO is a huge race amongst websites where everyone wants at least a podium finish. So, anything that gives them an edge in that race is highly beneficial.
3. Protection from hardware failures
Anyone who’s seen the hosting world for long enough knows two things. One, servers sometimes fail. It happens to even the best companies. Two, hardware failures happen all the time.
At the heart of the problem of failing hardware is the fact that a lot of storage still happens with HDD or Hard Disk Drives. These drives have disks that spin at great speeds and a moving arm that reads all this data. Given that there’s movement, there’s always some degree of wear and tear. That leads to failure from time to time. Now, many different pieces of hardware could and do fail. However, HDDs are pretty much at the top of the list here.
If a hard disk were to fail, you’d lose your data. If you lose enough data, your website could go down as well. The data that you lose might be crucial to the functioning of your business. Customer data, email lists, order lists — you know the sort of things that could happen if you were to lose data. Even if you have a backup, it’s not going to be put to work immediately. This can have a significant impact on your business website.
However, the latest Cloud Hosting architecture with Solid State Drives (SSD) has you covered. Solid State Drives are the newest upgrade in data storage drives — they are faster, more reliable, long-lasting and environment-friendly. SSD-based Cloud Hosting plans reduce the instances of traditional hardware-based data failures. So, the chances of losing data are almost nil. What is also drastically reduced is the chances of your website going down because of a hardware problem.
Conclusion
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing drive a significant number of people to a website. So, having good SEO is a must for your website.
Cloud Hosting is one of the many ways in which you can do that. Thanks to great uptimes, reliability, and performance, Cloud Hosting will help you better your SEO. And what’s more, leading hosting companies offer Cloud Hosting with a host of bundled services like caching, content delivery network, control panel, managed services, etc. This way, your switch to Cloud Hosting will be not only easy in the short term but also hugely beneficial in the long term.