When It’s Time To Blame Your Web Host (and move on)

The blog sphere will amuse you once in a while with a post like this:

Hosting on Exabtyes Can Affect Your SEO Ranking . Quoted:

My recent drop of PageRank 3 to PageRank 0 could be directly linked to Exabytes’s hosting, as pointed out here. Asking for a refund would be one thing. As it is now, www.meshio.com could be associated with “Explicit XXX Content”, hmm…

Looking from the brighter side, it came from a very well and passionately written personal finance blog (which rightfully deserved my linkback). Kudos to the owner of the blog, but allow me to clarify your above mentioned post.

Firstly, I’ll look past the obvious truth that page rank has no relation with the search engine ranking or traffic. The page rank dropped (and increased) is due to Google’s usual update their page rank algorithm. And definitely has nothing to do with your web host.

Secondly, the number of websites hosted on the same server would not affect your search engine ranking. A server that host 400++ websites are a norm for web hosting companies.

Thirdly, adult-related websites would not affect your search engine ranking either or associate your websites with it.

Search Engines are not retarded

Though I do not have any rock solid evidence to support my opinions above, but I would like you to think of this: - Search engines are not retarded. They are in the business because they provide relevant search results to users.

Would they put themselves out of business by associating your website with other websites hosted on the same server? Not likely so.

Think blogspot, Google’s own hosted blogging platform. How many bad apples (as in splogs) are there? Countless. Then how many blogs hosted there have high ranking and high traffic? Countless, too. You get the idea.

When it is time to change your web host

All in all, it is too easy to blame your web host when lightning strikes. It happened to me before. But there are times when your web host is really hurting your search engine ranking.

1. Down Time. Downtime is inevitable. Hardware/software upgrade and server restart cause downtime. There are so many web host that promise 100% uptime, but only few (or none) can deliver it. But constant downtime hurts your ranking. Because when search engine bots visit a website and get a 404, the search engine wouldn’t want its user to get the same message too.

2. Constant Migrate of Server. There are web hosting companies that keep changing the server for your website for no obvious reason (they will tell you it is hardware upgrade, but if the server needs to be upgraded every 2 months, it’s something fishy). Every time website changes its IP, the ranking decreases, and it takes time to regain back.

3. Server Crash, Data Loss, Spyware infected. This is the worst nightmares for all webmasters. One of my client’s website got infected by spyware (where the search result shows “visit this website may harm your computer”), then loss weeks of data when performing MS SQL upgrade (from 2000 to 2005) due to the incompetence of technical staffs. That hurts, big time.

When these things happen, then you really need to change your web host.

Lim CS on May 14, 2008

Join the conversation