How Does VPS Hosting Impact Your SEO?
If you have a website and have been struggling to rank it at the top of search engine results, then you will know about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it is extremely critical for a website.
It is a multilateral process which aims to increase the traffic of your website without advertising and ensures that your website ranks high in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. So, if someone searches for aspects related to you online, for example, the products that you sell or the services you offer, you want your website to be featured at the top. That is because those are the websites that people are likely to visit the most. Long story short, higher rankings means more viewers, which, in turn, means more potential customers.
Apart from a host of other factors, the choice of web hosting also has a direct impact on your SEO efforts. A robust and reliable web hosting platform will positively supplement your SEO efforts and help your website rank at the top of the SERP rankings. There are different types of web hosting solutions available — Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers. Each of them impacts your SEO efforts based on their specific architecture and features.
In today’s article, we will take a look at VPS Hosting and the ways in which it impacts your site’s SEO. Let us first understand what VPS Hosting is.
What is VPS Hosting?
VPS Hosting or Virtual Private Server Hosting is a type of hosting where multiple websites are hosted together on a single server, but the resources for every website are fixed. The dedicated resource allocation is made possible by server virtualisation through a software called a hypervisor.
A hypervisor is a software that sits on the bare metal server (physical server). Its principal job is to isolate websites and allocate resources to each of them. A hypervisor separates the server resources, operating system, and other applications from the underlying physical server. It then re-allocates these resources to the different virtual machines (VM) created through virtualisation. Thus, a hypervisor allows complete account isolation and ensures that a website in the server isn’t affected by other websites in any way.
In VPS Hosting, websites share the resources of a server, but each website is allocated some fixed resources. For example, if you’ve chosen a VPS Hosting plan that says you get 2 cores, 4GB RAM, and 8GB storage, those resources are fixed for you. Irrespective of how much resources other websites on the server are using, you will always have access to 2 cores, 4GB RAM, and 8GB storage.
Impact of VPS Hosting on Your SEO
1. Reliability and uptime
One of the most important advantages of having a VPS hosting setup is the fact that you get a small server of your own, so to say. Yes, the isolation of websites is virtual, and there are actually other websites on the server, but your website is still independent of others. The problems with another website will not affect you. The speed, performance, uptime, and overall security of your website in a VPS setup is not affected by any other website that shares your server. This has a bearing on SEO.
Search Engines have several ranking criteria for websites. Meeting all those criteria gives your website a boost in search engine results. One of those criteria is uptime. Search engines naturally do not want to send users to a website that isn’t up. So, search engines, like Google, continuously have ‘spiders’ crawling websites. If they find that your website is down, that is reported and will affect your SEO.
2. Speed
The speed of a website has a bearing on SEO. Google, Bing, or any other search engine doesn’t want people to go to a website that takes forever to load. Therefore, search engines prefer a website that loads quickly so that people can access information without waiting for long.
These days, the page loading time is crucial for people. Customers will not wait for a long time. They’ll just go somewhere else.
With VPS Hosting, you can completely control the speed at which your website operates. With account isolation and dedicated resources, VPS Hosting assures blazing fast website speed. If there is a sudden traffic surge, and you need more resources, you can seamlessly scale up the resources to manage the spike in traffic. Thus, VPS Hosting ensures good speed and performance for your website.
3. Root access
Root access is one of the most important advantages of VPS Hosting. Root access basically gives you complete access to your server; you get the highest clearance and full authority. This means that you can install custom software, change configurations, and generally tune your website to your exact needs.
With root access, you can install third-party security applications, change security configurations to ensure better protection, close all unused ports, prevent applications from unnecessarily accessing the internet, and do a whole lot of other things that make your website more secure and reliable.
This, in turn, has an impact on your SEO. As we saw earlier, secure and reliable websites are given a boost in search results. A safer and more reliable website appears higher than unsafe, unreliable ones.
4. Security
The security of a website is not just crucial for your website to grow and gain customers’ trust; it’s also important for your SEO efforts. If your website shares resources with a website having a lax security setup, it opens up a ton of opportunities for hackers and malware.
This could compromise files that are important for your business, or even bring down your website. Again, that becomes a problem for SEO.
With VPS, you are not only more insulated from the problem, but you also have more control over the environment. The account isolation eliminates the ‘bad neighbour’ issues. On the other hand, with root access to your server, you can configure your website to be as secure as you want.
Conclusion
SEO is a crucial part of any website’s marketing strategy. It’s a very powerful tool if used correctly. Not just small websites, even huge corporations strive to have good SEO content on their websites.
If you’re creating a website for your business, it’s crucial that you pay close attention to SEO efforts. You’ll need relevant content, great speed, security, and uptime for SEO to deliver. Moreover, it’s also worth all the effort that you put in because SEO brings organic growth that ads can’t deliver. And as web hosting plays a crucial role in your SEO efforts, it is essential that you choose your hosting plans with proper research and understanding of each hosting solution.
VPS Hosting can play an important role in your SEO efforts. It can be a powerful aid to your overall SEO strategy. What’s more, VPS isn’t all that expensive. Considering the host of features that VPS Hosting plans offer, they are one of the most cost-effective hosting solutions.
Leading hosting companies have great VPS plans that are not only relatively inexpensive but also come with a ton of additional features and services, like free cPanel, free SSL, full root access, advanced DDoS protection and instant scalability. If you’re thinking of building a website with a robust SEO strategy, VPS Hosting plans might be exactly what you need — economical, secure, and powerful.
