Hosting - Can Help or Hurt Your Google Rank!
10.10.07Filed Under: Website Profitablity, Search Engines, Google and the Hamptons
You pay $10 bucks less than Joe for Hosting and you’re proud of it? Think again my friend! Spell Dollar Wise and Penny Foolish for me. Sorry for the Sarcasm but…
I HATE when people ask me about price first. The second thing I really hate is hearing that “your prices are too high” and when I say “what would you pay for a website” they say “I don’t know”.
Or worse they tell me about the low low hosting prices of _____ and I just spent 5 hours saving a client’s website from being annihilated and four hours and 55 minutes of that time was trying to get someone on the phone who knew what they were talking about.
My client gets a bill for $500 from me, and saved $120 over a year, had nothing but frustration, her site never worked right - it was slow, etc. it ruined her rankings in Google and Yahoo and other engines due to the slow speed (more on this below), etc.
Price first means the prospective client is thinking incorrectly about the most important advertising and business tool they can have today.
I don’t mind people not wanting to feel ripped off - I don’t either - but the perspective is completely incorrect. More, it’s a dead give away to a professional who can use that to rip you off.
It’s important for you to understand Hosting and Email (email hosting) and of course website design and marketing to enough of a degree to get the complete picture of how these technologies work, what is involved to make them work properly which is where cost comes in, so you investments make money (or can pursue that at least), rather than just spend less money and have it not working for you while you don’t even realize it.
Just like you need to understand how taxes work or any other part of your business. Website Design, Hosting, Email and Marketing constitute a MAJOR part of your business. If it doesn’t - it should! These are very important elements in today’s business world and really are a daily event in your life. Not knowing means losing money, and opportunity.
THUS WHY I CREATED THIS BLOG
To me an educated client is a great one. I can’t stand when people play dumb technically in hopes that means they also don’t understand their bills. It’s again, the wrong perspective because your bill from my company (or any quality website design and hosting company) should be less than the amount of money you are directly and indirectly earning from the site.
Or “I don’t have time” well make time - or you won’t benefit from this technology.
Hosting is the most important part of your website presence, other than the site itself.
Hosting companies lure you in with lots of features, huge space allotments and a gazillion other things you will NEVER use, nor will you want to. It’s a hype game playing on the ignorance of the lay person - a hobby of many business people sad to say. What they’re not telling you is that to have a low hosting fee, you need to overcrowd your servers which means undoubtedly your website will load slower than a site on a fast server. So what does that mean?
EVERYTHING!
When you have too many websites on a server, you cannot control the activity on the server accurately - simply because there is so much space and speed in one machine. Companies that overcrowd servers charge low hosting fees and thus - that’s their mindset. Not quality, money.
They don’t’ want to pay for monitoring either - that costs money.
The server is nothing more than a specialized computer. That computer, if it is hit by too many people, will slow down. The CPU usage as it nears 90% or so, will not only slow the speeds of the sites, but crash some of all of them.
Websites on average or poor servers go down approximately 14 times each day - usually when you’re not looking. But someone is on your site and they’re saying #$%#$%#$.
But worse Google and other major engines that list your website (free and/or paid ads) want to know that your site is loading fast, not slow. That means a poor user experience for those who found your site in their engines and were sent to your site. You’re saving $10 a month or so, means they lose business. So… they don’t like that.
Servers are expensive to run, and keep updated. No one cares really - do you? You need to.
GOOGLE and other Engines and Slow Server Speeds
When Google comes to your site to re-index it each week, they are seeking new content, links to your site, their traffic #’s, yours, and the overall quality of your website. The robots that evaluate this, focus on important criteria. One of those is the speed by which your site opens.
Slower speed, points lost, your rank drops.
Ok so you save $10 - that’s a whopping $120 a year or better stated 3 cents a day. What will you ever do without it. But we all love a deal don’t we. Well here’s a professional perspective of this particular deal so many are seeking it seems - cheap hosting…
FAGET ABOWD IT.
Server speeds relate to overall quality of service you offer those who you do business with using your site and email - email works off a server too!
What is important here is to understand that hosting need to be exorbitantly expensive = maybe $20 a month more - so to pursue this low hosting fee thing, is just bad business.
Clearly you or anyone would select the $15 a month plan above the $50 a month plan based on price. This means, you are doing that because you think they’re basically the same. Clearly they’re not. And, you know in the back of your mind they’re not - you just want to save money. OK, me too. But, hopefully when you’re done with this article you won’t seek cheap hosting. Personally I want all cheap hosting GONE - they host bad sites, they slow everything down, they are hacked by spammers as they are not monitored enough, etc. I want a quality experie4nce for myself and my clients. Don’t you?
Don’t buy cheap hosting!
Email today is a drag too - and confusing to most people. Just like hosting.
There are so many new problems due to spam, you would not believe it. Email has to function in an environment of separate servers clustered together to insure email is working fast. Because of spam, and viruses being created daily, programming has to be upgraded to combat them, and, check each email as it passes through the server process. Too many emails and the servers slow down, the email slows down, it recycles itself and if too much email is coming into the system, everything sucks.
More, server companies have to have relationships with the major players like Hotmail, Gmail and others - to insure that they comply with their spam rules. Many average people use these email services more than emails associated with a business domain. So getting email to them is extremely important.
An example is that if the word “free” exists in the wrong places in an email it can be flagged as spam, putt in a folder and your client would never know it got there. At one point, having an IP address in an email put up a red flag, so replying to an email that had an IP address in it, could be flagged as spam. The list goes on and changes monthly.
So a quality email service has to monitor all of this, all the time. It cannot be free.
Your Email Address should marry your domain name.
info@yourbusinessname.com
Not
your businessname@im-2-cheap-to-pay-for-email-so-my-email-sucks-and-i-don’t-know-it.com
Or worse
Sometimes people send me an email with a photo in it and I don’t get it instantly and they say “your email server sucks”…well there you have the expert layperson yacking away because their FREE service just sent the email to me INSTANTLY.
YAY
VIRUSES AND ALL
Including the latest and greatest worm that will not only destroy everything on your computer but probably enter your colon and sit there as a tape worm too!
My servers check every email, every attachment thoroughly to insure it is virus free. That takes a few minutes - OH MAN 2 MINUTES …
It costs 41 cents today for one postage stamp. If you price one regular mailed letter it’s about $1.00 per including your time to go to the PO to mail it etc.
Email is taken for granted.
Email that is of a higher quality will cost a little money. Free services cannot be trusted - you may think it’s great because no one complains but you may not be getting your email to its destination. Many servers delete email they think are spam - they don’t bounce them back so you just don’t know it’s not getting through.
That alone is the end of that discussion.
Cheap Hosting is between $10 and $20 a month. Quality hosting starts at about $30 a month, but $50 is more reasonable. That means that 365 days a year, 24 hours every day your site is UP - with a guaranteed up time of 99%. No one can promise 100%.
Free Email is a big mistake for business.
Spending between $10 and $20 a month is fair for a few email accounts that are properly monitored to insure your email gets through 99% of the time. No one can promise 100% - if they do they’re lying.
SUMMARY
Cheap business people are only topped in my book by cheap rich people.
Or neurotic psychologists.
Or fat diet doctors.
Or … you get the point.
If you want cheap hosting, don’t have a website.
It won’t get ranked well, and, your visitors will get frustrated.
Be clear about what these important elements are, and realize that like any other profession there are hidden truths you just won’t know being a lay person…
Unless you read my blog EVERY SINGLE DAY. 
What you need to do is find reliable webmasters who can help you because they know, or they should know, but they want to be paid well like you to give you that information and, implement it with and for you. You cannot do this yourself. You must have a competent webmaster to handle your website professionally.
In the end, being penny wise and dollar foolish about anything in business comes from place of fear, being ripped off in the past, being mistrusting and really not taking important areas of business seriously. Certainly there is a price line for everything, but your site, your advertising should all be an investment for return.
A website is a tool, it is a highly technical creature - and it requires a myriad of other services to insure that the entire process works well. You don’t have to spend a fortune on a website (for normal sized businesses) and hosting or email, but don’t go for the lowest common denominator either.
Be sure your website, hosting and email services, and online marketing is being done with expertise, pay your people well, and look for your return on that investment. Check it weekly, give it months, not weeks.
In the end, it’s the hidden things you do not know that can ruin your business. Just like hiring a crappy builder, who doesn’t know how to really lay a foundation - it may take 10 years, but one day, your house caves in.
Hosting and Email Services (email hosting) is the foundation for your entire website presence and communication. Be sure it’s strong and being handled with expertise.
So it doesn’t cave in on you!
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Written by
John Monteleone
www.HamptonsWebDesign.com
www.HamptonsDirectory.com
631-725-5251
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