I have seen this posted across many forums and I am sure many of you would be curious to know the
answer to this question too. I believe that Web Hosting does not directly affect your websites
search engine performance but indirectly it does.
See it does not really matter which company is hosting your website or the platform your
website is hosted on. It can be Linux, Windows or whatever operating system you choose
your website to be on, it does not matter. But there are a few obvious factors that will
affect your search engine optimization efforts. I am listing a few as they come to
my mind below:
- Server Speed: If you have a website hosted on a very slow and sluggish web server
then you don't need to be a genius to know that you website will server slower to your
end users compared to a website hosted on a fast, high performance server. Search
engines do keep a note of the time it takes for your site to open each time a browser
makes a request for your website. It will register your site as a heavy site. Further,
more customers will leave your site before it even opens. This is something which is
also noted by search engines. They make a note of how long a customer stays on your
site. If more people leave your site too frequently that means your site has nothing
noteworthy to offer to your customers and it will be assumed that you do not have good
content to keep your customers on your website. Definitely a negative point in terms
of optimization.
- Black Listed Servers: If your site is hosted on an IP that sends out spam or hosts
illegal or adult websites, your website too will be seen in the same light. Which is
definitely not good.
- Servers that are frequently down: There are hosting providers around with
servers that has less time and more downtime. Stay away from such service
providers. A website not found or down is equally bad for search engines.
Imagine Google trying to crawl / index your site and it finds that your site
is not available at all.
These are a few points that can affect your website search engine
visibility or popularity immensely.