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Choosing the
right hosting company is a must in achieving top search
engine rankings for several reasons. First, you want to
choose a reputable company that has 99.7% uptime or better
so that when the search engine spiders and robots make it
to your website, your website will be up and operating.
If you hosting company tends to have a considerable amount
of downtime, then these spiders and robots may just visit
your website when it is down and not come back to it for
weeks or months.
This is a huge
price to pay for being cheap! In this case, being cheap
will cost you more money. It is better to choose a hosting
company will give you, say 100mb of disc space for your
site (most websites come nowhere near to this size and if
they do, they are either a major mega website or they have
not been optimized for size or speed properly) and the most
bandwidth you can get - 30 or 40 gigs, for instance.
If you go with
a cheaper hosting site you may get only 10mb of disc space
for your site and 1gig bandwidth. The problem with this
scenario is that if you go over the disc space or bandwidth
limitations, your hosting company will most likely charge
you lots more dough. Sometimes a cheaper hosting company
will shut your site down if immediate payment is not made.
Once again the search engine spider or robot may just pass
your by. So it is better to buy more than you need and not
have to worry about limitations.
It is also generally
a better idea to purchase your domain name at a different
place than you have host your website. Some web hosts will
do both, but the problem is if you wish to change hosts
some website hosts will charge you a hefty transfer fee
for you domain name and may take more time than desirable
for the transfer. Having your domain name hosted separately
gives you more flexibility.
Free hosts can
cost you when it comes to search engine rankings. If you
have a company like geocities host your website, most likely
your website is called www.geocities.com/yoursite.html or
some variation. This is not optimal for two reasons. First,
if you exceed your bandwidth for the month, this host will
shut down your website and put a fancy little splash screen
in place of your website stating you have exceeded your
bandwidth.
So, if you website
is popular, which most likely is your goal, you will spend
more time with your website down to customers and search
engine spiders and robots. Second, search engine spiders
and robots generally give more weight to your homepage than
to your subordinate pages. In this case, your homepage is
actually geocities.com and your main page is a subordinate
page to this homepage. Most search engines will give your
subordinate homepage less weight than someone else's homepage
at yoursite.com.
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