What does your hosting company have to do with your Search Engine Optimization efforts?

Well, a lot more than you might think!
Let's take some points to consider selecting your Hosting or if You need to move to another.

Your hosting company provides you with a platform to run your Joomla (or any other website) on.
Mostly they will offer your hosting on Linux, with Apache web server and a MySql database.
This is great stuff, most of the time running stable and without problems.

Now here are the things to look for:

1 Your site needs a really long time to load, even if you have almost no images.
2 Your site has frequent outages, and the helpdesk is not really helpful in getting the solution.
3 You cannot make and use your own .htaccess file (a must for Rewriting the URL to better page names)
4 The neighborhood (other sites hosted on the server) is not so good, in the worst case even a spammer.

Note 1. The spiders and bots only have a short time to index your site, before they move on…. they won't wait for a slow loading page…
Note 2. Problems with a website, are registered, not only by normal users but also by spiders.
To many unreachable URL's can get you thrown out because they think there is no site anymore.
Note 3. Your .htaccess helps you in getting the right URL's from your Joomla SEF component or even the standard SEF functionality.
Note 4. Servers that have Bad neighborhood websites, normally share an IP range, so if this range is identified as, let's say, “not so nice websites” there is a BIG change your site is influenced by them, thus dropping your ranking.

What you really, really want for your hosting
– fast servers, with a good infrastructure and good track record.
– Not too many websites on one server
– A good control panel that lets you manage every technical aspect of your website
– “Clean” servers, check if your hosting provider has a policy of banning “bad” sites.

And … a good “value for money” for You to give you a good feeling that you are in the right spot with your hosting.
So You see, speed and 24/7 access to the website is a real important aspect of Search Engine Optimization.

A Good Joomla Hosting is Siteground.com on which you get all of the above and more, go check it yourself.