Hosting SEO – what it is?

If you run a business, you know that having an online presence is crucial. You need to have a website that looks professional and is easy to navigate, and you need to make sure your site is optimized for search engines. This is where we come to SEO. And where in all of this is hosting?

What is SEO hosting? How do you understand it? Is it worth investing in SEO hosting or is standard hosting enough? What impact does it have on SEO? That’s exactly what today’s post will be about – you’ll see why you should pay attention to hosting in terms of SEO.

I’ll show you what factors matter most when it comes to hosting so you can make the right decision about where to put your website. Stay tuned!

What is SEO hosting?

There are two concepts of SEO hosting – old and new.

The old definition of SEO hosting

SEO hosting is a type of hosting service that is most often used by SEO specialists or and marketing agencies. SEO hosting differs from ordinary hosting in that the service provider provides several hundred IP addresses as part of this service. In addition, they usually came from different address classes and were assigned to a variety of geolocations. This provided a certain level of anonymity.

Webmasters used this type of hosting to keep multiple websites in one place. The purpose of doing so was to optimize costs and uptime. It was easier to manage multiple sites from one place. Multiple IP addresses meant that Google could not accurately track down connections between sites. Such a practice was widely used for so-called back-end sites (back-end sites, PBNs).

More often than not, SEO hosting in this sense allows for bulk operations to effectively manage multiple sites. For example, this may include bulk addition of domains, rapid change of IP addresses (including randomly), IP blocking (to hide SEO back-end from robots or specific individuals) or masked DNS zones (to keep sites from being linked to each other).

The following is an example of this.

An example of such a definition of SEO hosting could be offers from:

• SEOHOST with access to nearly 200 IP addresses from 14 address classes,
• SEOLite with access to nearly 2,500 IP addresses from more than a dozen address classes and 10 geolocations.

Such packages are also offered by Neteasy, HostingHouse, among others.

New definition of SEO hosting

Today, most web hosts still offer access to at least a dozen address IPs in their SEO packages. However, this refreshed definition places great emphasis on the impact of SEO hosting on Core Web Vitals.

SEO hosting is hosting that will facilitate achieving high Core Web Vitals, and thus provide a high user experience for your site. As for the role of hosting, it’s mainly about website loading speed and lower TTFB. Website loading speed from the hosting side is affected by the type of hard drives (SSD with NVMe technology), type of server (e.g. LiteSpeed with additional LS Cache plugin), supported protocol (HTTP/2) or DNS server response time, among others. SEO hosting must also provide security (including SSL certificate support, backups, malware protection).

Types of hosting

• Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting service. It is ideal for small businesses or personal sites. With this type of hosting, your site shares a server with other sites. The advantage of shared hosting is its price, included support and management. The disadvantage is mainly resources and potential bad neighbors.
• VPS hosting is an alternative to shared hosting. It is more expensive, but you get your own virtual server, that is, a piece of dedicated server resources. The disadvantages are the price and the need for some technical knowledge. You are free to configure the server as you wish.
• Dedicated server – is the most expensive type of hosting; it gives you full control over the server, which usually has a positive effect on the loading speed of your site. Requires a lot of technical knowledge or hiring a person, responsible for configuration and updates, as well as emergency situations;
• Cloud hosting – allows you to quickly scale up the resources used by your website.

Price of hosting for SEO

If you want a fast and well-functioning site, don’t just suggest the price. For one small or medium-sized site, it will be uneconomical to invest in VPS hosting or a dedicated server. Unless you are planning a large marketing effort that will bring significant traffic to the site.

The prices of basic packages of good hosting settle within the range of PLN 150 gross per year. We are talking here about shared hosting, but with good support.

The price of a good hosting package is about £150 per year.

Best hosting for SEO

Below, I present my subjective, based on past experience and non-committal ranking of the best hosting for SEO in 2022.

1. Prohost – good management panel, good DNS server response times for Poland, good support, server location in Gdansk
2. Atthost – supports HTTP/2 protocol, ability to activate SSH access for those with technical expertise
3. thecamels – backups performed up to 30 days back

The selection was made based on personal experience and opinions gleaned from the Internet (forums, newsgroups). This is as far as Polish hosting providers are concerned.

When it comes to foreign countries, here are the most interesting two hosting providers. Both of them are based on the cloud.

They are also based on the cloud.

1. Cloudways – is such a “intermediary” between cloud hosting, whose task is to manage the server. It is a relatively easy option to start the experience with hosting, based on the cloud. We pay more, for the cost of management.
2. Vultr – is a direct cloud provider. Vultr is also available with the Cloudways option. In addition to Linode, DigitalOcean, Amazon or Google.