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If you are wondering if who you host with can affect your search engine rankings, the short answer is “yes”. Web hosting solutions are often too quickly chosen – and then forgotten.  And… hosting is the foundation of your success on the web.

While there are lots of important reasons to chose the right web host, here are the most crucial ones from a SEO perspective.

Website Downtime
Aside from web visitors being unable to access your website when not available, downtime has an impact on search engines as well. Engines of course cannot crawl and index any web pages when a site it not up. And… even worse, Google will not rank your site high if it is often down or unavailable.

Website Uptime Downtime Chart

Recommendation:
Find a site monitoring service to track downtime to determine if this is an issue for your website. Ideally your uptime should be 99 percent or better.

Web Host Location
In addition to uptime being really important, so is the location of your web host. We often find in our SEO Site Audits that the client, who wants to get found in a Canadian Search, is appearing as a US company to Google. One of the key indictors that engine’s use in country-specific search results is based on the location of the website’s server.

Recommendation:
Find out where, as in which country, your site is being hosted. Do not assume a Canadian host, or web design company providing these services, has their servers in Canada.

If you are not monitoring your site uptime or not 100% sure where your website host servers are located, it is time to check it out.