In order for users to be able to access your website from across the internet, it needs to be “hosted” somewhere. Your choice of “web host” is critical to the performance and success of your website, including its SEO. In this article, we will attempt to demystify the various options you have for web hosting and provide some guidance on choosing the perfect web host solution for your website.
In this article:
The effect of web hosting on SEO
How to check if your web hosting affecting your website SEO?
What type of web hosting you should choose for your website
What is web hosting?
Essentially, your website is a specialised software application. Under the bonnet, it uses a collection of files, databases, code, etc to build web pages and deliver content and features. Just like any software application, your website needs a computer upon which to run and file/database storage to store all its files and databases.
A computer that is built and configured to handle the special requirements of running and delivering websites to users is known as a web server. Web servers are usually powerful computers providing lots of processing power, memory and file storage. In most cases a “web server” will actually be a collection of powerful computers, each configured for a specific task such as running database software, handling requests from users to access a website, providing fast storage for website assets such as images, videos, providing storage for website backups, etc. The collection of computers would also normally be configured to provide redundancy, to allow websites to still be available if one computer in the collection developed a fault.
A web server also has to have reliable, permanent, fast access to the internet.
Just as you can run multiple programs at one time on your laptop, a properly configured web server can efficiently “serve” multiple websites. The number of websites a single “web server” can reliably handle will depend on many factors such as the complexity of the websites and the underlying website code, how much traffic is being received by each website, etc.
So, web hosting is simply the act of installing a website onto a web server and letting that web server run (or host) the website. In other words a web server hosts one or more websites.
It is certainly possible for individual businesses to configure and run their own web server out of their own offices and some organisations may do this. However, the cost and overhead of configuring and maintaining a web server should not be underestimated, For most businesses, it is far cheaper and more convenient to just outsource the hosting of their website to a specialised web hosting company.
The effect of Web Hosting on SEO
As we discussed in our article on Google Core Web Vitals, website performance and page load times are becoming increasingly important to achieve good SEO. From earlier this year, Google has started to penalise websites that have poor performance. As such, if you have a website that is perfect in every other way, but is slow to load, you may find your website sliding down the Google search engine rankings, meaning less customers finding you and visiting your website.
Because it is the computer that your website runs on, your choice of web host is critical to the performance of your website. The key is to choose the web hosting that is correct for your website. In that respect, if you’re running a simple, few page, static, brochure type website your requirements for web hosting will be significantly less than a busy e-commerce shop, hosting hundreds of products and serving millions of customers.
Types of web hosting
There are basically three types of web hosting defined by companies offering web hosting services:
- Shared Web Hosting
- Virtual Private Server
- Dedicated Server
There are a few variants of these basic types that we will also discuss.
Shared Web Hosting
As mentioned above, a single “web server” is perfectly capable of hosting multiple websites. This fact allows companies to offer “Shared Web Hosting”. In other words, a single “web server” is used to host multiple websites. This is the cheapest type of web hosting available, sometimes free! However, you need to keep in mind that your website will be sharing resources with many other websites and that you have no control over who or what other websites are using the same server.
A good shared web hosting provider will go to great lengths to ensure security between websites and to dynamically allocate resources such that one “rogue” website cannot use all available server resources and slow down other websites on the same server. However, be aware that not all “Shared Web Hosting” is equal and the less you pay the less you are likely to get. At very low prices (or free) the hosting provider may be just cramming as many websites as possible onto a single web server and/or severely limiting the resources made available to an individual website.
Specialised Shared Web Hosting
One of the challenges for companies offering generic shared web hosting platforms is that their platforms have to be designed to accommodate a wide range of different types of websites built using different technologies and web design platforms. This has led to a number of web hosting companies providing highly specialised shared web hosting targeted at certain specific web development platforms. For example, our own shared web hosting platform is built specifically and optimised for WordPress websites.
Specialised shared web hosting will provide you with enhanced security and significantly improved website performance over generic shared web hosting. Additionally, the hosting is likely to provide you with a range of additional useful features specific to web development platform. e.g. our WordPress hosting platform provides the option for automatic WordPress and WordPress plugin updates, daily backups, malware scans, etc.
Advantages of Shared Web Hosting
- You won’t find cheaper web hosting.
- Shared web hosting usually comes with an easy to use control panel that makes it easy to manage your website.
- You don’t need to worry about the technical aspects of the underlying web server. Your hosting company will take care of this as part of your hosting package.
- It is usually very quick and easy to get your website up and running on a shared hosting plan.
- A good shared web hosting provider will have the infrastructure in place to ensure the stability and reliability of its shared web hosting platform, meaning that your website should never be unavailable to users.
- If you are building your website with a specific web development platform such as WordPress, specialised shared web hosting can provide you a range of useful features, enhanced security and high performance. Well configured specialised shared web hosting can mitigate most of the security and performance limitations of generic shared web hosting.
- A good shared web hosting platform will actually be a distributed system of dozens, if not hundreds of individual servers providing resilience, stability and scalability for individual websites.
Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting
- Performance on low cost generic Shared Web Hosting can be problematic. As we mentioned in our article on google core web vitals, website speed and performance is increasing important for SEO. Particularly on low cost generic shared web hosting, your website may never be able to load fast enough to meet current website performance expectations.
- If your website starts to attract a large amount of traffic, you may find that your website starts to be “throttled” to prevent it from negatively interfering with other websites on the same shared hosting platform. Your website performance may deteriorate.
- You have no control over the other websites also being hosted on the same web server. If your web hosting provider doesn’t have good policies in place to restrict the types of website it hosts and has not paid enough attention to security between websites, it could be possible for another website to pose a security risk to your own website.
- With shared web hosting you have no access to the underlying server configuration. In order to prevent abuse and ensure security between websites, certain types of web applications and custom code simply cannot be run on a shared web hosting platform.
Virtual Private Server
With a Virtual Private Server (or VPS), you are still renting shared space on a single physical “server”. However, unlike Shared Web Hosting”, where resources are dynamically allocated to the hosted websites depending on demand, with a VPS you get a fixed, dedicated slice of resources. Essentially, a VPS is your own mini-server. When you rent a VPS you will typically specify the resources you need for your website in terms of:
- Number and speed of processors
- Amount of memory
- Amount of storage
- Internet bandwidth
The selected resources will be permanently assigned to your VPS. Additionally, your VPS will have its own operating system and its own web server software. Once configured, these resources will be dedicated to your website. No-one else can access or host their websites on your VPS.
Most hosting companies offer the choice of either Managed or Un-managed VPS hosting.
Managed VPS hosting
With a managed VPS, your hosting company will still take care of the technical aspects of your VPS. You don’t need to worry about the operating system, web server or database software. All maintenance and updates of the server will be handled by the hosting company. You would typically be provided with a control panel to manage your website that looks very similar to that offered with Shared Hosting.
In essence, a managed VPS solution is as easy to manage as a shared web hosting package but you get a fixed dedicated set of resources upon which to run your website.
Unmanaged VPS hosting
With unmanaged VPS hosting, you will be responsible for all of the maintenance and updates on your VPS. You may be required to install your own operating system and web server. There will be no easy to use control panel unless you install one yourself. Essentially, you will be renting a bare-bones virtual server that you need to fully configure and maintain yourself. This can be ideal for the technically minded or for those that need to run specialist web applications that require detailed tweaking of the underlying server. For most business websites, however, the level of technical expertise required to make use of an unmanaged VPS hosting package means that Managed VPS hosting is usually preferable.
Advantages of a VPS
- Provided a VPS is properly specified you can get dramatically more memory, storage, processing power and bandwidth with a VPS than you can on a shared web hosting package.
- Your website will never be “throttled” due to increasing traffic or due to interference from other websites.
- With a VPS you will be able to run custom web applications and custom software code that cannot be run on shared web hosting.
- Particularly if you opt for a managed VPS solution, your web hosting provider will provide you with at least the same guarantees for stability, performance and website uptime as you would get from shared web hosting.
- If you opt for a managed VPS, you will be provided with an easy to use control panel to manage your website. However, even with a managed service, you will still typically get access to additional server performance configuration options should you need them.
- With an unmanaged VPS, and to some extent with a managed VPS, you can configure your VPS exactly to the requirements of your website.
- When you rent a VPS, you are essentially gaining access to a specific part of a single computer. However, many modern VPS providers provide a distributed, scalable and resilient VPS platform. This means that your VPS can actually be duplicated and moved around between physical servers automatically to provide stability and resilience.
Disadvantages of a VPS
- A VPS will be considerably more expensive to rent than a shared web hosting platform. A managed VPS service even more so.
- The added level of control and technical configuration options provided by a VPS can be daunting. This can be mitigated by choosing a managed VPS service that will typically provide you with configuration, maintenance and ongoing support. If you opt for an unmanaged VPS, you will definitely need someone with technical expertise, maybe even a dedicated system administrator, to take care of your VPS.
Dedicated Servers
As the name implies a dedicated server is a self-contained, physical computer server exclusively dedicated to your use. Just as with a VPS, when you order a dedicated server you will configure the detailed specification for that server. In this case, however, you are specifying a real, physical server. Although you can rent smaller dedicated servers with specifications similar to a VPS, you can also specify monster dedicated servers having 100s of Gigabytes of RAM, the very fastest Intel processors and Terabytes of hard disk space.
Just like a VPS, most hosting companies offer a choice of managed or unmanaged dedicated servers, although the managed servers may be called something else. Particularly with an unmanaged dedicated server, you will have full control over everything on the server, including which operating system to use.
Advantages of a dedicated server
- A dedicated server, properly configured, will give you the highest level of performance, for your website.
- Absolutely no aspect of the dedicated server is shared with other businesses so your configuration options are maximised as the hosting company does not need to “protect” other clients from bad configurations you may make.
- You’re not limited to renting a single dedicated server. You can rent a complete network of dedicated servers to allow your web application to grow, to provide redundancy, etc.
Disadvantages of a dedicated server
- As you may expect, given it offers the greatest possible performance, a dedicated server is the most expensive option to host your website.
- You will definitely need someone with a high level of technical expertise to install, configure and manage your dedicated server. A managed server may offset this to some extent but, if you need a dedicated server for your website, you probably also need the detailed level of technical configuration only provided by an unmanaged dedicated server.
- A dedicated server is just a single computer. You will need to implement your own solutions for resiliency and fall back in the case that a fault develops on the server.
Additional Services
Your web hosting company may provide you with a range of additional services and management tools to make the day to day job of maintaining your website easier. For example, our professional WordPress web hosting provides a wide range of additional features and tools, including:
- Built in caching
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Theme management
- Plugin management
- User management
- Dedicated staging site to allow you develop and make changes to your website without affecting your live site.
- Global Content Delivery Network (CDN).
You are more likely to find additional services and tools made available on shared web hosting packages and managed VPS packages. Unmanaged VPS and dedicated server packages are unlikely to offer such a range of additional features.
Is your web hosting affecting your website SEO?
One simple way to check if your current web hosting is having a negative impact on your website performance is to run our free Website SEO Performance test.
Simply visit the page, type in your website homepage URL and run the test. After a few seconds you will receive a comprehensive performance report.
First look at your grading for Performance. Anything below a rating of A means that your website speed and performance could be improved.
Under recommendations, check if there is a recommendation to “improve server response times“. This recommendation directly relates to the performance of your web host. It is basically saying your web server (web host) is taking too long to respond.
Finally scroll down through the report to find the detailed Performance Results. Look at the gauge for Server Response. You really want the response time to be a fast as possible, certainly below 1 second and ideally below 0.5 seconds. Again, this metric is directly related to the performance of your web host. Look also at the gauges for All Page Content Loaded. If the Total Page Size gauge is showing a value in the green but the All Page Content Loaded gauge is in the red, this could also indicate that your web host is too slow.
Note: If your Total Page Size gauge is in t he red, this means that the size of your web page is too large, probably due to large images or other content. In this case, you should look to reduce the size of your web page.
You can also use other website performance tools such as google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how your website and web host is performing.
So which type of web hosting should you choose for your website?
If you’re just starting out with your first website, or you’re undertaking a major upgrade to an existing website, it can be difficult to decide which type of web hosting would be suitable for your website. Your web designer should have the technical expertise to guide you to choose the most appropriate hosting package based on the complexity of your website, its security needs, expected traffic, etc. Of course, your choice of web hosting will also be dictated by your available budget. However, you should keep in mind that your website should be one of your most important business assets. A correctly designed and hosted website should help drive business growth and customer engagement. As such, it can be a false economy to scrimp on web hosting. So lets take a look at budget and recommendations for the different types of web hosting we’ve discussed.
Generic Shared Web Hosting
Typical budget: £0 to £10 per month
Free and lowest cost generic shared web hosting should be avoided by everyone. If you really have very small budget for web hosting and your website is very small, maybe a few static pages, you might be satisfied with the lowest cost hosting but generally avoid.
As you start to get towards the £10 per month, you will have a good range of good quality shared hosting available from respected and trustworthy companies. At this level, hosting should be suitable for most static business web sites and small scale e-commerce or booking websites. You will not get the best website speed and performance but speed and performance should be adequate to prevent SEO issues. However, if you are using a web development platform such as WordPress, you would get improved performance by choosing a specialised shared web hosting available for a similar budget.
Specialised Shared Web Hosting
Typical budget: £10+ per month
If a specialised shared web hosting package is available for your web development platform, you should choose it over generic shared web hosting. Specialised shared web hosting will give you good performance and website speed for a wide range of business websites including small e-commerce sites (although we would always recommend using a VPS for an e-commerce site) , membership sites and booking sites, etc. You will also get access to a range of additional tools and features specific to your web development platform that will make the day to day job of maintaining your website easier.
Virtual Private Servers
Typical budget: £10 to £300 per month for unmanaged VPS, £20 to £400 per month for managed VPS.
The first thing to say is that, although you can rent a VPS for as little as £10 per month, this will likely give you far less specification and website performance than on a specialised shared web hosting platform. In most cases, you would need to be looking around £25 per month to get a VPS configuration that provides equivalent performance to say our professional WordPress web hosting and £40 per month to get improved performance.
That being said, a lowest cost VPS can provide a good solution for a development server or for websites with very low performance demands but you require the additional configuration and isolation provided by a VPS.
A mid-range VPS costing £40 to £60 per month is suitable for a wide range of mid to large size business websites, including mid-scale e-commerce sites and sites expecting a lot of traffic. A VPS is also suitable for web applications such as mid-scale booking or membership websites.
Managed VPS packages are as easy to manage as shared web hosting packages and are suitable for most businesses without requiring additional technical expertise in order to configure and manage the VPS.
Dedicated Servers
Typical budget: £60 to £1000 per month, per server (or more)
Because a dedicated server (or network of dedicated servers) is ultimately configurable, they are the choice for the most demanding large scale websites and e-commerce stores and for web applications with specific configuration and performance requirements such as games servers.
Remember, you can always upgrade your web hosting
Whatever hosting you choose to launch your website, you’re not stuck with that choice forever. With modern tools it is relatively easy to transfer your website to a new web host. For example, we offer a managed service, at no additional cost, for customers wishing to move to our hosting. We can migrate your website onto our hosting with zero or little downtime.
We also offer a one click upgrade from our WordPress web hosting to one of our VPS packages. Once you’re on a VPS package, it is easy to change the specification of that VPS to provide more processing power, increased memory, etc.
The key thing is to routinely monitor the performance of your website to ensure that your selected web hosting is not negatively impacting performance and SEO. You can use our free website SEO performance tool as often as you like to check this. Alternatively, if your website is running on WordPress, we offer complete monthly WordPress maintenance packages that include constant monitoring of your website performance.