Choosing a hosting company for website promotion
In recent years, there has been a change for the better in all things related to website hosting companies in Israel: While options in Israel were once many times more expensive than their counterparts abroad, today it is possible to find hosting at an affordable price and even dedicated hosting packages for content management systems such as WordPress.
But will all packages contribute to promoting your website to the same extent? That’s a completely different question and depends on many factors that we sometimes simply don’t take into account before choosing a hosting company.
Website loading speed
Google wants fast websites and even admits that a fast website can be ranked higher than a slow website in the same field. Website speed is a factor that is becoming increasingly significant in terms of SEO. Therefore, first and foremost, we need to make sure that the server where our website is stored is suitable for the main target audience we want to serve. If we have a website that is intended for the local market (Israel), we will usually have no problem because most hosting companies use local servers.
On the other hand, if we have an international website, but we still want to host it with a local company that will give us fast and efficient technical support, we need to find out if the company has the option of letting us host the website on a server outside of Israel, such as a server in Europe or the US.
Another factor that affects the speed of the site loading is the amount of resources available to our site at the hosting company. For most small and even medium-sized sites that are mainly content sites or image sites, shared hosting can be sufficient. On the other hand, complex sites that require a lot of system resources or sites with a lot of traffic will usually need a virtual private server where separate resources can be allocated to each site without affecting the performance of the other sites on the server. Therefore, you should also compare the prices and different features of the VPS hosting packages (hereinafter VPS packages for purchase) at the different companies and not just compare the standard hosting packages.
Number of sites in the package
Most hosting companies provide several hosting packages that differ from each other in the number of sites that can be used on the same package. If you are promoting several sites at the same time, it is better for you to choose packages that are suitable for several sites in order to save costs and to access and facilitate access to the different sites. It is worth emphasizing that if you are promoting several sites and want to link between them, it may be better to ask the web hosting company to have each site stored on a different IP address (at the C Class level) in order to minimize the chance of you receiving lower rankings due to cross-linking.
The availability of the sites
Uptime is actually the percentage of time your website is available and accessible. As expected, the standard for most hosting companies is 99% availability, but unfortunately, you can still find sites with lower availability here and there. A site with low availability is one that Google may have difficulty accessing, making it difficult for it to display a true and up-to-date image of the site, which will obviously hurt its promotion efforts.
Another thing that can affect the availability of a website is an unprotected system that is susceptible to DDoS attacks, attacks designed to overload servers and prevent legitimate users from accessing them (i.e., browsing the websites stored on them). Most modern hosting companies offer various software and protection measures against these attacks as an integral part of their hosting packages.
If you want to be sure that the hosting company you choose is reliable and professional, ask them to send you a comprehensive availability report of their websites. Most professional companies will be happy to send you the report.
Daily backup
Although the website is usually developed in a local development environment outside of its hosting company, there are still situations where people forget to make backups when changing or updating the website, creating a situation where it is not possible to go back to a previous version. If the website does not load or is displayed incorrectly because of the change, Google may lower the website’s ranking in the results. It is precisely for these cases that the option to back up the websites on the server where it is stored is intended. Most hosting companies offer daily backups that are stored in a separate directory on the server and can be easily accessed via the FTP service to retrieve the original files.
Protections on the server itself
Google not only ensures that the most relevant sites are displayed to the user, but also warns them about unsafe sites that may harm their computer. Such sites are usually sites that have been infected with a virus or malicious script that may infect other computers. Once Google identifies an unsafe site, it displays a warning prominently in the results and even prevents users from accessing the site.
To minimize the chance of your website being hacked, you should choose a hosting company with a built-in protection system such as a firewall or the ability to protect sensitive folders at the server level itself (a feature found in the vast majority of server management software such as Cpanel). For more information on website security (with an emphasis on WordPress sites).
In conclusion, don’t settle for a superficial examination before choosing a hosting company, but rather conduct a careful comparison in order to find the company that will provide your users with the best user experience and will also contribute to its promotion in search engines.
