How Does Hosting Affect Your Online Marketing?
October 17th, 2008 by Eric Brantner
Since this is the SEOhosting.com blog, it only makes sense that we should examine how hosting affects your online marketing campaigns. After all, the last thing you need is for your host to be holding your company back from creating a successful online presence.
Here are a few ways hosting affects your online marketing.
- Social Media- With the popularity of social media rising by the day, companies are starting to see this platform as a great way to promote their brand. By creating content that goes hot on a site like Digg or Reddit, your site could experience a significant surge in traffic. If your visitors like your content, they’ll continue to promote it and they might even link to it. But if your hosting company isn’t reliable, your site could crash from all the incoming traffic. This will undo all your hard work of promoting the content on the social media sites.
- Google Penalties- Some of the cheaper hosting companies tend to host sites with spam-filled content—like gambling sites and scam websites. If your website is hosted on the same server, the server could get blacklisted, leading to your site losing trust and rankings. While this isn’t always the case, it’s definitely better to play it safe than to be sorry later if your site gets banned by chance.
- Email Marketing- This goes hand in hand with the first point. If you’re running an email marketing campaign, you’re going to have lots of visitors coming to a specific landing page. Online users tend to be very impatient. If a sudden surge in traffic has your landing page loading slowly, or not loading at all, your whole email marketing campaign could be in jeopardy.
- Search Rankings- While Google understands that websites occasionally suffer from a server crash, if your server is constantly going down, it could take a toll on your search rankings. If your site is down once when the search spiders come through, it’s not a big deal. But if it happens multiple times, it could become a serious issue of trust. Not to mention, it would make it difficult to index your new content if the server is constantly crashing.
The bottom line is this: take the time to invest in a quality hosting company. This is even more important now that the holidays are coming up. You’re bound to be running holiday marketing campaigns, and you want to make sure your site is ready to handle the surge of holiday shoppers. Give your customers a great, quick shopping experience, and you’ll be likelier to earn a loyal consumer base.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 am
These are all good points. Obviously you don’t want you site to be blacklisted because it is on a server with spammers. Also pretty obvious you don’t want your site to go down because it can’t handle a sudden search in traffic bacause it is on the first page of digg. Can you tell me regarding these two scenarious is there any measures in place that SEO hosting and/or Hostgator has in place to regulate spammers websites on their servers. Then regarding the social media example would I be less likely to have my site down due to a sudden spike in traffic if I’m hosting with hostgator or SEO hosting?
I guess I’m just curious how these scenarious can be addressed.
Thanks.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:12 am
I meant to say “sudden surge in traffic because”. Not search in traffic bacause.
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:12 pm
@Gerald: To answer your first question, SEO Hosting puts your site on a unique Class C IP address, so your site would not be associated with any “bad neighborhoods” that could result in blacklisting.
In regards to your second question, since you are using WordPress for you site (great choice by the way!), I recommend the WP Super Cache plugin (which has been designed specifically to help blogs survive the “Digg effect”): http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:43 am
Awesome! Thanks for the plugin info. I’m checking that out now.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:06 am
[...] of traffic over the course of a couple of days (which can bring down your website’s server if you’re not prepared), StumbleUpon can continue sending a steady stream of traffic for even weeks or months. For [...]