SEO and Hosting Issues
Hosting Issues Hosting, simply put, is how/where your actual website (it’s pages, images, videos, etc.) are stored. You must have a server hosting your data for the website to be live and for users to see anything. Now, hosting options range from hosting yourself on your own PC to renting and/or buying a dedicated server just for yourself. With this range, so goes pricing from “you’re already paying for it as part of your Internet connection at home” to thousands of dollars up front and hundreds more per month. Time to get real here, too – do you really need to spend $100 a month on a dedicated server for your 20 page website or blog? Is your website so sought after that the instant it goes live it will have thousands of people each day visiting it? I’m pretty sure the actual answers to both of those questions are no. You might wish the answers were different, and given time and hard work they may BECOME different, but for now, let’s be real. 20 pages don’t take up much space, and there won’t be thousands of people there each day to start off. So, let’s take a bit more detailed look at typical hosting options. 1. Do it yourself – while this option exists, it’s pretty limiting. Sure, you could put the gear on your PC, but then users are limited to YOUR connection speed at home and the site won’t be live if you turn off your computer each night – let’s skip this option completely. 2. Hosted template site – generally a cheap way to get a functioning, attractive site live in one evening. Great if the site is more for your resume or will be used like an online business card. Templates mean you drag and drop your pictures where you want them, there’s no coding involved and you typically get a selection to choose from. Trouble is… a. Because it’s a template, others exist which will look virtually identical b. You often have very little control over changing meta tag data, as you most likely will not be able to access the code. You will be able to enter a description and suggest keywords, but these “tags” will be placed on every page of your site – not good. 3. Shared Hosting – this will meet most people’s needs to get started. Packages range from a few dollars a month and up, and most allow FTP access to your area of the server. You can control each web page individually, so writing individual titles for each page is a snap. More expensive than a hosted template, this is a logic first step for many Webmasters as even the most basic shared hosting option will accommodate a website with 50 or more pages. Some drawbacks are… a. You most likely won’t be able to use 301 redirects because you cannot actually access the server – you can only access YOUR portion of the server – and most hosting companies will not put the required files in place on the server as they affect everyone on the server, not just you. This means you cannot easily solve the redirecting of requests for non-www versions of your domain, which can lead to duplicate content penalties. b. Because you share a server with many other websites, if one of them is very busy, the server will be slow, and your website will run slow – not what you really want for your users. c. Because many hosts use the same IP address for multiple sites when using shared hosting, you might end up on an IP address which /is/was associated with a website which has been blacklisted. This is rare, but happens. Luckily, the engines are recognizing what shared hosting looks like and will usually not “throw the baby out with the bath-water” as it were. 4. Virtual Dedicated Server – More expensive than Shared Hosting, this option gets you control over your own “virtual” server. Basically, there may be 3 or 4 other “virtual” users on one server, but it’s a far cry from Shared Hosting. The added benefit is you get to control your section of the server – you install what you like on it, set up users, domains, subdomains, tweak folder structures, and in some cases, your interface allows you to edit documents right there on the server – no copying them to your PC, updating, saving and re-uploading to refresh things or make simple changes. You will also get the choice between being hosted in a Windows environment, or in a Linux environment. Please choose the Linux environment. Chances are you’re fairly new to Webmastering, and trust me, adding SysAdmin-ing to the docket will be a hefty weight. Learning how to do things in the Linux environment isn’t that different than in Windows, it’s simply that many simple things you’ll want to do later can be controlled very simply through editing one document in a Linux environment. One real bonus to Linux-based hosting is it’s compatibility with the .php language. This is important if you ever want to use anything from the Open Source community – such as blog software or posting forum applications. Open Source items don’t work well with Windows hosting – sometimes not at all… 5. Dedicated Hosting – this one is simple – the whole server is yours. You are the only one using it, the space and capacity is all yours, you maintain it – everything is you. Trouble is, it’s VERY expensive – often more than $100 per month. This is not really what most folks starting out need. IP Addresses: Dedicated v. Shared This is less of a concern today than it was even just a year ago. It’ still something which I recommend people look into, though. When you choose a hosting option, the default it to run your website on a shared IP address. So, your IP address might be 123.123.123.12, and you might learn that others have the same IP address – this does not mean users will go to someone else’s website, it simply means that the numerical address used to “locate” your website by spiders, etc., is the same as another website. Normally this type of thing isn’t a big concern, but if the last person to use that IP address was blacklisted form Google for spamming, then it’ll be hard to get your website to do well in Google because of the penalty applied tot hat old IP address. Same goes for an IP neighbor who might be spamming and gets penalized. You’ll most likely have to contact the engines directly (not an easy task) and request they review your individual circumstances. This can take MONTHS. It’s very cheap to add a dedicated IP address to your hosting plan and it ensures no “neighbor” can land you in hot water. Having a dedicated IP address will NOT get you around issues of a previous domain getting banned for spamming. This rarely happens now, though, as Google is a registrar and can see when IP addresses were issued, who they were issued to, etc. Basically the engines like Google know when “The Bad Guy” gave up that IP address, so they know it’s new to you.
