A very important aspect that is perhaps not given the importance it should is the choice of Web Hosting . If you ask any marketing professional to know what type of hosting they use, the answer will probably be very different, sometimes motivated by the price, other times by a recommendation, other times by the characteristics of the Hosting, etc.
If you have already changed web hosting , it is very likely that you have had a bad experience or simply that the hosting you had contracted did not meet the expectations placed on it.
In this article I will tell you everything you need to know to choose the right type of hosting for your website or blog.
Table of Contents [ Hide ]
1 What is Web Hosting?
2 Types of Web Hosting
3 Tips for choosing web hosting
4 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Web Hosting
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that you can hire where a provider offers you a single or shared server connected to the Internet.
The most common use for hiring a hosting is to create a website or a Blog , although it can also be used for other things such as:
File server.
Streaming Server.
Virtual disks or drives.
The basic features of a hosting service include:
Email server with a limited
on page seo service number of email accounts.
Hosting web applications compatible with HTML and/or PHP.
MySQL databases are an essential element for creating most current web applications such as: general websites, blogs, forums, online stores, online teaching platforms .
FTP access for management and administration of web files.
Creation of virtual disks with which you can create folders very similar to the Dropbox service.
Limited bandwidth and storage space. There are hosting companies that advertise unlimited service, but in my experience unlimited = problems, what do you think about unlimited hosting services?
Backups? All types of web hosts provide them, although some will charge you for this type of service, so check before signing up.
Types of Web Hosting
Shared Accommodation
Shared hosting is the most widely used web hosting service and can be accessed both for free and for a fee. In the case of paid hosting, it usually costs between 30 and 100 euros per year depending on the features and the contracted provider.
This type of server has limited resources but is a very valid solution for websites or blogs that do not have a large volume of web traffic.
Use the coupon 1MESHOSTMAW and you will have one free month to try a very professional shared hosting with Raiola Networks.
free hosting readers
Hosting on virtual private servers or VPS
With a virtual private server, also known as VPS, you will have a powerful machine to host your web projects.
Its cost is higher than shared hosting, but so are the enormous features and qualities it offers you.
A VPS can be installed with the different control panels:
cPanel . It is one of the best known and most common control panels that we can find in most web servers.
Plesk. It is the solution that offers us the best page speed for the web pages we store. So from the point of view of web positioning it is the best choice .
DirectAdmin. A solution to manage your VPS in an easy way.
To add one more thing I would like to say that they are easily scalable.
Marketing and Web Blog uses this type of hosting. You can use the coupon 50MAWVPS and you will get a 50% discount on the first month.
vps 50 readers
Dedicated Servers
This is the ultimate in web hosting, as all the resources available on the server are solely for you.
Logically, of the solutions seen so far, it is the most expensive and that is why it is usually used by medium or large-sized companies.
On this web server only you have access and can install things.
Servers or Cloud Hosting
This hosting solution is one of the most innovative and allows us to contract only the resources we need and pay only for the resources we consume.
Thanks to the fact that we can decide at any time what resources we need, it is very easily scalable.
It is a very secure and robust hosting solution, and is usually chosen when you want a complete guarantee of the contracted service.
Reseller Hosting
This is a virtual or dedicated server where you can install and host several websites, but you can also sell them to your clients.
This is the solution chosen by web development companies that offer hosting services in their product catalogue.
It is very important that we know how to handle the machine's software well since we will provide support to our clients.
Tips for choosing web hosting
1.- Reduce the latency time of your web hosting
If we want to rank in Spain, will we have an advantage if our website is hosted on a Spanish hosting? This is a classic SEO myth that has always existed, but I will try to delve into it a little and not stay in the classic regional explanation based on the IP.
In this case I will refer to latency, which means the time it takes for a query to travel to the server and return to the user. This value affects the loading speed and therefore must be taken into account.
To explain it more graphically, I give you this example:
seo latency
We all know the importance of the loading speed of a web page in SEO and usability, so we must keep in mind, regardless of where our server is located, that our target that consults our page has the lowest possible latency time.
2.- Web Hosting with excellent availability
[clickToTweet tweet=”Hosting availability is a key factor for #SEO” quote=”Hosting availability is a key factor for #SEO”]
Avoid making the mistake of choosing the cheapest hosting and saving 10 or 20 euros a year, because you have to know that the stability and availability of the server strongly affects web positioning. For this reason, always avoid 1&1 type hosting, since you will be putting your positions at risk and therefore the organic traffic you receive from the Google search engine.
If you are a regular reader of mine, you will know that last year I had the Marketing and Web Blog hosted on Hostgator, and everything was working fine until I started receiving traffic of around 1,000 visits per day. From that moment on, the service started to crash and I had headaches. But thanks to my friend Dean Romero, who knew about the problems I was having with that provider, he put me in contact with Raiola Networks, the company where he had his Blog hosted, and he told me that he was super happy with the quality of the service, the professional quality and, above all, the human quality of its technicians.
And I have to say that from the first moment the treatment was excellent and we began the journey from Hostgator to Raiola Networks. Something that particularly caught my attention is that the DNS migration was super fast and did not affect the availability of the Blog, absolutely amazing.
Some symptoms that indicated to me that it was time to change are:
Page slowness . Sometimes, an absurdly slow loading time.
Server outages. Given the server problems, what I did was create an alert every 15 minutes to analyze whether my website was working correctly and I received 1 to 2 alerts every day informing me of the service outage.
I have now gone 2 months without receiving any service alert email and this has allowed me to remove the word Hosting from my list of most hated words.
To give you a practical example of how server availability can affect SEO , I bring you a real case from Javier Gosende, where he tells us how a web project suffered a Google penalty and a temporary loss in its positions and visits, due to being out of service for a few days because the migration to another hosting was being carried out.
SEO server down
In the image we can see how there is a drastic drop in web traffic due to the change of server, and how shortly after the traffic is recovered, but with a figure lower than that which was before the migration. Finally, 3 months later, the values and the lost web traffic are recovered.
3.- Optimized for loading speed
One of the aspects that the guys at Raiola Networks have managed to surprise me the most is the optimization of the speed of my Blog, reducing the loading speed by half, going from just over 3.5 seconds of loading to 1.7 seconds.
pingdom pagespeed
How do they manage to optimize speed so much?
Below I will explain some of the components of their VPS that make the loading speed reduce to the minimum possible:
Nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache and cache : Nginx allows you to serve static files from websites and works as a page cache using Memcached (in RAM) to store the cache, with this it achieves very high efficiency when serving pages, especially on viral sites where the improvement is almost 100%.
ZendOPCache as OPCache for PHP: This is something that hosting providers do not usually implement, since very few manage to make an OPCache work correctly and be compatible with all CMS and PHP scripts on the market (in cPanel it is almost impossible to make it work 100%).
OPCache pre-caches processed PHP code and stores it in RAM. When PHP code that has already been processed and cached is executed, response times are reduced by more than half.
Memcached as an object cache: Memcached allows us to save cache in the server's RAM, where access times are up to 20 times faster. Normally, when it comes to Wordpress, Memcached is used with W3 Total Cache or with Flexicache , which reduces resource consumption and considerably improves response times.
