SEO Web Hosting

By Web Hosting on Dec 6, 2007 in Web Hosting

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SEO Web Hosting

With so many sites out there today, the competition is fierce. One of the best ways to get traffic is to get a good ranking on popular search engines for popular keywords. To do this requires search engine optimization(SEO) work. Since high rankings in search engines are so sought after, good SEO services are also highly sought after. Because of this the market for SEO and SEO hosting has gone through the roof and many people are jumping in hoping to make a profit. However, finding the correct hosting plan for an SEO service is not so easy and many SEO companies suffer because of a poor choice. When choosing a host for an SEO service, you need to look for uptime, technical support, the ability of support ticket software, e-commerce and secure encryption options, types of scripts allowed on the hosting server, and SEO perks that come with hosting. Most of these apply to shared hosting. On a dedicated or VPS(Virtual Private Server) plan you can ask the host to install these things for you if you have a managed account or will need to install these things yourself if you have an unmanaged account. However, it is still a good check to go through to make sure you have everything.

The first thing in SEO hosting is uptime. Although almost all paid hosting companies claim 99.5% uptime or better, this is simply not true for most hosts. What they are referring to is network uptime and thats up as long as your bandwidth carrier does not go down or your fiber-optic cables don’t break. In reality uptime as most of us consider it, is the actual amount of time that our sites are online. Server crashes, server slowdowns, mySQL errors, and a variety of other factors all effect actual uptime but do not impact network uptime. To truly monitor uptime status you will need to go to a hosting review site or a site that keeps benchmarks on paid hosting metrics(search on google) to see how much uptime the host has actually had over the last month, 6 months, and year. It is also advisable to read online reviews of the host you are interested in to see what other users have to say about their server status and uptime. If your site does not have good uptime, you will lose many potential as no one will buy from a company that cannot even keep their own site up.

The next thing you will need to know about a host is the quality of their technical support staff. Since you have many customers of your own, you will probably have a lot of customers wondering what happened if your site should go down. Because all sites do have downtime at sometime along the line because of one reason or another, you need prompt answers from the technical support staff to get your site up and running again. You will also run into database errors, server locks, and many other situations where fast attention from support personnel is crucial. A host that fails to have adequate technical support staff is not worth considering. To get an idea of the quality of technical support staff you have to go to forums such as webhostingtalk.com and ask in the “web hosting” forum about the said host. There will be many people there who have used your host in the past or are using your host now that can give you good feedback on the quality of their customer service. Most of the time you can even pinpoint the average response time that the host has for support tickets. Any host that takes over twelve hours to respond to an initial ticket should not be considered. Another good measure of the quality of technical support the host has is the amount of clients they have per server. The more people a host jams on a server, the more problems their hosting servers will have and the less amount of time the technical support staff can dedicate to each specific customer. In general, I would look for a host that puts less than 500 accounts per server(less than 200 ideally) for better performance. These hosts will perform much better than a host that shoves thousands of accounts on a server.

Another thing you want to look for is the features and scripts that come with the hosting. By this I do not mean PHP/MYSQL as almost all hosts come with this combo of features. By features, I mean support ticket software for your site and e-commerce extensions that your host has by default. For an SEO firm, it is important to have a support ticket system installed for your customers. Good support ticket software is often expensive but some hosts come with a system pre-installed for you to use. This is a great help to starting an SEO company as it will give customers an easy way to ask for help and get quotes from you. It also lends credibility to your SEO service as it shows that you are committed and care for your clients. The other thing to look for is if your host provides already set-up e-commerce software like OS-commerce to help you sell your services to clients. This is very important because these programs are at times hard to set up and a hassle to manage if it is not pre-installed on the server when you buy the hosting plan. Aside from e-commerce software, you’ll want to make sure that your host offers 128-bit encrypted SSL or has an option to add this on at an additional cost. Very few people will actually buy anything from a site that does not even have a way to provide secure e-commerce transactions because of credit-card theft. Not having SSL will deal a major blow to your business and may prevent it from getting off the ground.

The fourth thing to ask about before you purchase SEO hosting is the ability to run certain spider scripts to grab Google, Yahoo, and other search engine ranks and backlinks. You also want to have the ability to run scripts that submit sites to several search engines on your site. Many hosts do not allow these types of scripts as they are server-intensive and if used by a lot of people can easily crash a hosting server. However, these are the types of services that will initially attract a lot of people because they are a convenient and easy way to see how their site is doing currently and also they are a good way to keep track of progress through time. Finding a host that allows these scripts will be a big help to initially launch your business as these basic tools will give me a reason to come to your site.

The last thing you want to look for is incentives of SEO perks for signing up. These come in the form of free manual submission of your site to major search engines and many times will include up to $100 in Google,MSN, or Yahoo advertising credit if you sign up for the yearly plan. This is the feature that many SEO startup firms look at first and they will go with the hosting plan that offers the most of these perks. However, in reality, this should be the last thing to consider as it is just a small side benefit and is not nearly as important as the other things mentioned above. However, if your host does offer these perks, spend this money wisely as it will give you a large amount of exposure to start off your business and you could really capitalize on this exposure.

In conclusion when choosing a host to start your SEO firm look closely at the features offered before you buy. Do not just take a once-over glance at the basic features and perks before jumping on with a host but do in-depth and detailed research to find out what they are really like on the inside. Doing this will ensure that you get a service that will stay up and is willing to help you out when you need it. Not doing it means lots of downtime and bad service that will lose you many customers.

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