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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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