There are dozens and hundreds of SEO factors (see on page SEO factors and my Google ranking factors posts), and one of those factors is hosting. So to answer the question posed in the title (does hosting affect SEO), YES hosting and SEO are linked. Let’s take a look at how hosting affects SEO.

Hosting and SEO

There are two major ways in which hosting affects SEO.

First, if, for example, your website is on the same IP address as a site which is spamming the high heaven out of the internet, search engines can target that IP address and punish anyone on it as unfair as that is just because it’s easier; there have been a few documented cases of that exactly happening.

The other major way in which your hosting can hurt your ranking is if you’re having problems with your hosting in terms of keeping your website online and accessible. Having a website which experiences a lot of downtime can have two fallouts:

One – Webmasters who link to you begin to get notifications that your site is down and their links are pointing to an unreachable website, causing them to remove their links and consequently any boosts in the SERPs which you enjoyed because of said links now disappears along with those links.

Two – Search engines themselves will notice that your site is unreachable and will punish you/lower your ranking because they don’t want to be directing their customers to inaccessible websites.

Therefore it behooves you to go with a hosting company whom you can trust. I’ve used GoDaddy hosting for 6 years and have never had any downtime issues once. Get your hosting through GoDaddy with my special discount link to get as many sites hosted as you want for just $1.99 a month – you won’t find a better deal than that.