Shared Hosting Vs VPS Hosting
-
From an SEO perspective what are the advantages of VPS Hosting VS Shared Hosting for a local website that has less that 200 pages and gets max 2000 hits per month?
Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?
-
What is the site built on? If wordpress, check out wpengine (no affiliation). Just saw this post and wanted to respond as I had tons of downtime when I migrated a site to a shared environment on another host. Site kept having downtime no matter what I tried with support. So you can imagine the frustration and how this can impact the business not just from a search perspective. I think the question here is how stable do you need something. Does shared work? Yea sure. But if you are putting something that is the core of your business on a $4.95mth host, than you get $4.95 worth of insurance.
-
The 24- 48 hours time frames are highly overstated. There are numerous methods of transferring a site with no downtime. Even if you have downtime, it is typically a couple hour period (locally) where some users will go to the old site, whereas other users will go to the new site. If you have a relatively static site which services a local area, such as a local realty site, the issue is quite minimal.
Here is the bottom line....your current site is hosted on a shared server which is so restrictive you can't even add a 301 redirect. To be candid, a site which has operated under those conditions could not reasonably be so hyper-sensitive to the potential short transition period from a simple server change. If I am mistaken, then you need to hire a professional developer to manage the migration on your behalf.
-
I was also wondering what is your opinion on Rankings impact from changing Host providers?
If done correctly, there is no negative impact at all. The primary issue is during the switch over itself.
The issues of duplicate content and split links should not be a factor. Those issues can potentially occur when URLs change. That does not happen if you are simply changing hosts. The same applies to the www vs non-www and index.html issue. If these issues are not presently occurring, and you properly move all files associated with your site, and your new server is properly configured, the items you mentioned will not be considerations.
-
I have reached out to several hosting companies and they stated that my site will be down for 24 to 48 hours if I transfer my site over to their service.
I am sure that this would impact my rankings for having the site down. They said it's because I will need to update the domain servers.
Is there any way to prevent downtime while transferring a site?
-
Thank you for your answer. I was also wondering what is your opinion on Rankings impact from changing Host providers?
I ask this because my current Web Host doesn't allow me to do a 301 redirect.
I have heard that changing providers can negatively impact search rankings because of the change of IP Address.
Note: my concern is duplicate content and split links to my site. From www and non-www version of home page along with the index.html version.
-
Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?
In short, absolutely. Longer answer below.
Shared hosting typically involves hundreds of websites on a single server. Shared hosting is the lowest form of hosting offered. It is very common to have all types of bad sites (porn sites, mail spammers, etc) on the same server as your real estate site. Server outages are common along with numerous other issues such as having your mail server flagged for spam.
A VPS typically divides a server's resources like a pizza into 8 - 12 "slices". You have dedicated resources assigned to your site along with over a 90% reduction in the user population. If you care at all about SEO, which you apparently do based on your presence at SEOmoz, you should consider using VPS at a minimum for site hosting.
I have worked with clients in the past who have tried shared hosting with quality hosts. I worked with the hosts to move the sites to other shared servers which they deemed as more mature / stable. The sites still experienced monthly outages. Typical site owners are not even aware of these outages. As part of a solid SEO plan, you should use a monitoring service to notify you of any site outages. I use Alertra but there are many similar services available.
-
For a site of that size and traffic volume I think you'll be fine with shared hosting - as long as you choose a reputable, quality host - which can be difficult when it comes to choosing a shared hosting environment!
I hesitate to recommend specific hosting companies because I've had both good and bad experiences with a number of hosts. Do your research and find a host with great support, reputation and standards.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Please share best high quality low cost animation and video production services for less
Hi, Here's what I'm doing: I've got Creative Suite and I'm putting together animations and videos for several websites, finding clips and images and forming what we need. What I need: A video production service to put everything together with their fine 10X or near "touch" without charging me too much since I did all the legwork. I'm asking for a miracle here, I'm asking for almost 10X animation, but where I do the legwork and it doesn't cost very much. Real low budget here, but we're not willing to put out anything low par. Please share any services or advice you know of. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Desktop vs. Mobile Results
When googling on www.google.ca for "wedding invitations" and in my own geo location market of Toronto, my site - www.stephita.com, will show up differently on SERP on desktop (Chrome & IE) vs. mobile (iPad, iPhone, android, etc.). On desktop SERP, I will show up 6/7 position... (which is relatively a new position, the past 3 weeks - I was previously on page 2) (After a bunch of SEO fixes, I've managed to propel my site back to page 1!) On mobile SERP, I only show up on 1/2 position on PAGE 2 😞 As I mentioned above, I did a bunch of SEO fixes that I think were related to Panda/Penguin algos. So I'm wondering why my MOBILE SERP has NOT improved along the way? What should I be looking at to fix this 5-6 position differential? Thanks all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TysonWong0 -
HTTPS entire domain Vs. one URL
Long time no Moz! Ive been away with some server related issues, installing an AD at the company I work for, but I'm back. Our SSL cert just expired and I'm trying to determine the pros and cons of making an entire site SSL vs just the URL. Our previous set up was just a single domain. I know Google has hinted toward SSL preference, and I know its a little early to know for certain how much that's going to help, but I just wanted to know what everybody thought? It expired yesterday, so I have to do something. And we lost our previous credentials so I can't just renew the old one. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Should each physical store have its own ecommerce store on subfolders, or share a single national one?
Each store has its own subfolder (in my mind this hasn't actually happened yet 😉 ) on the main head office domain i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1 , maindomain.com/localstore2 etc. I am happy that this is the best structure for SEO purposes. I like the local SEO advantages to it as each store can have its own NAP and show its own inventory. However I am worried that each store having its own ecommerce site will lead to duplicate content issues. So I am having a rabid debate with myself as to whether each store should:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG
a) have its own ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1/ecommercestore
b) have its own ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1/ecommercestore with each product and category page having canonical links to the corresponding page on the main ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/ecommercestore
c) just have one ecommerce website with local stock shown e.g. maindomain.com/ecommercestore/productpage shows in an inventory in a line (below the price or such like): " localstore1 (3 items) localstore2 (0 items)"
d) just chill, inventory stock-outs happen just don't worry about showing local stock And its not good to have internal rabid debates, so I'd like to ask the wider moz community. For bricks and mortar stores (branches or franchises) how would you set up ecommerce stores? Thanks.0 -
International SEO and server hosting
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites. Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others). So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites. We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh-riley0 -
Ad units or % of ads vs content?
When looking at content "above the fold" is it more important to look at ad units or the visual % of unique content to ads? For example, if there are 6 small ad units or one large ad unit that takes up 30% of the page, which is better for search engines? In general, is 50% unique content above the fold with 50% ads adequate or what % do you try to optimize for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
Location of the web host provider and SEO
There has been several debates on the topic of the geo location of hosting provider and the impact on SEO and rankings. As a best practice, it is recommended to host in the same country you are targeting but are there any studies available that confirms the web hosting providers location influences rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1
