Hosting speed a factor in SEO?

[bluemaian]

I am currently enquiring into a different hosting package for a number of large e commerce websites which require high bandwidth.

At present we are on an silver plus hosting package with a company called actinic. The hosting isn't too bad but its extremely expensive.

actinic.co.uk/services/ecommerce-hosting.htm

It has been brought to my attention that the speed and quality of the hosting plays a factor in SEO?

Does Google favor certain hosting companies? type of hosting? or dedicated servers?

Please let me know your thoughts

 

[MattUK]

Yes - in extreme cases, 99% of the time you'll find that your host is fine, don't feel you have to fork out for a dedicated server or anything.

However, if you find that you're getting frequent downtime, or timeouts on page loads, then this can and will interfere with the indexing of your site.

Personally if you're site is a business I would go for hosting that you can trust. This doesn't always mean the most expensive. There are many reliable shared and VPS hosts around, I would do some reading on some hosting forums before deciding on your next step.

 

[Tricky1]

Try Pinbrook, dedicated to Actinic hosting, run by Jo who is one of the main contributors on the Actinic forum, very helpful in the rare occassion you may have a problem.

I have a couple of sites hosted with them and both run very quickly without any downtime.

Richard

 

[bluemaian]

Thanks tricky! i have been on the phone with pinbrook and am awaiting a quote. Hopefully there not too expensive!

 

[accelerator]

The Google spider will give up if you pages aren't served quickly enough. Not sure what the timeout is though.

Rgds

 

[deconstruction]

if you add google webmaster tools, it will tell you if it ever has any problems with the speed of your site/pages

 

[ddwebguru]

Speed and quality of hosting does not have any significance impact on the ranking of a website as far as I know. But the location of the hosting server can play a major role as the concept of Geo targeting plays a vital role in this regard. However, it should not be too slow because it will definitely scare away the visitors and you will loose business simply.