If you have a website, it’s being hosted somewhere. If you’re well-versed on the benefits of good hosting for SEO, you probably also know that a reputable host is important for doing SEO hosting.
Some of the popular hosting options include Class C hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting (be sure you learn about the effects of VPS hosting on SEO), and cloud hosting.
Unlike other options, with cloud hosting, your applications and data are stored across the cloud using multiple servers. This results in many competitive advantages over other hosting methods. Not least of which is a broader access to system resources than having to rely on a single host.
Reduced Site Downtime
One of the most significant advantages of cloud hosting is that it can increase your site’s uptime. If you’ve had downtime issues with other hosting providers, preventing your website from experiencing downtime might be important.
Servers crash from time to time–when they do, the sites hosted on those servers will crash, too. When your site is kept on numerous servers that provide redundancy and backup support, this becomes less of a potential issue because it’s rare that all of the cloud servers will crash simultaneously. When one server is down, visitors can still view your website via one of the other servers.
So, what effect does this have on search engine rankings? Google rankings don’t reward sites that go down frequently. Therefore, the less downtime your site has, the better its ranking.
Better Location Advantages
You should know that web hosting isn’t fully digital–physical servers are needed in real-world locations, and where they reside can be important. While ranking sites, Google prefers servers hosted near the person searching. As a result, if your website’s server is located far from a searcher’s device, Google will likely ank it lower than a website housed closer to the searcher’s device.
However, if you use cloud hosting, you can avoid this problem and keep your site on numerous servers in different places, providing you with a broader area of impact without having to own multiple domains in different locations.
Faster Loading Speeds
Faster page loading speed is another advantage of cloud hosting. Because most cloud servers use a content delivery network to increase page speeds, cloud hosting will help your website load substantially faster.
This is a massive benefit for your SEO rankings as loading speed plays a significant role in your Google results. Users avoid visiting a website that takes ages to load, especially when so many alternatives are available–most users will use the “back” button if they wait more than five seconds.
As a result, the site will lose a lot of traffic, resulting in worse rankings. However, cloud hosting can significantly improve page loading speed—and improve your SEO results.
Better Mobile-Friendly Sites
Cloud hosting can improve your website’s mobile friendliness and page performance. Google values mobile friendliness because it has a separate search engine ranking for mobile browsers, and a website that isn’t mobile friendly won’t rank well and will lose traffic from mobile devices. You can solve this problem by employing responsive design in your site, and cloud hosting can play a part in that.
Aside from their web hosting services, cloud providers include powerful mobile analytics. These metrics offer significantly more information on how to improve the mobile layout of your site, showing you ways to make it more mobile friendly and allowing you to draw in mobile traffic.
Better Security Options
Cloud hosting is more secure than other forms of hosting because it includes various features to help defend your site from bots. These solutions can protect your comments from spambots and scraping bots that try to produce replicas of your content. Both of these behaviors would harm your rankings, but cloud hosting can help your SEO by eliminating them. It can also protect your website from virus threats by safeguarding your site’s content and securing site visitor information.
You’ll stop Google from dropping your rank using cloud hosting, which it’ll do if it finds viruses or duplicate content on the website.
Conclusion
Why stay tethered to a single physical server when you can spread your data across the internet? Plus, you gain competitive advantages such as better security options, faster load speeds, and lower downtimes with cloud services, meaning that choosing not to take advantage of cloud hosting could be your biggest mistake.