How much do you spend on hosting for your site? Probably not very much – even businesses can choose the cheapest over the best value.
Most hosting is sold as a commodity – how cheap can you eat? That means that so much hosting can be unreliable and/or slow because you are at the mercy of problems and overloading caused by other sites crammed on to the panting hardware.
I made the move
Back at Easter time, I finally got fed up with the slowness and unreliability of the hosting I was using for Writing For SEO, and the poor quality, slow support by people who often didn’t seem to know what they were doing. I moved hosts.
I ended up spending something like six times as much as I do for some very good plain vanilla hosting I’ve had several sites on for some seven years.
For a load of reasons that I won’t go into here, when I launched this site I tried a different host. But you live and learn.
I wanted to find the best hosting possible for Writing For SEO, hopefully a permanent home so I could cross hosting off the To Do list. I went through my own mental list of good hosts. I asked around and Googled.
I took the plunge and went for WP Engine. And I’ve been very impressed so far.
The obvious benefits. And the not-so-obvious
The obvious benefits are:
- Easy migration and set up
- An altogether snappier site
- No downtime so far
- Much better support
- Great understanding of WordPress
But the greatest benefit has taken a few months to notice. My traffic figures have been going up impressively since I moved the site. My overall SEO strategy has not changed, but I have been implementing it steadily since launch, so things could just be kicking in, nothing to do with the move.
Although I do have good reason to believe that the strategy has been able to kick in properly thanks to WP Engine. The real traffic take-off has been since I moved the site, and it continues to improve.
Google likes good hosting
Aside from the timing, why should I attribute my better traffic to moving web hosts? Google has for a while penalised you if your site is slow or has outages. Basically, if you’re on unreliable hosting, your Organic traffic will suffer.
It makes sense to me. And, as a very important part of my business, $29 a month for keeping Writing For SEO running sweetly seems like a bargain.
What have your experiences been with hosts?
Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links. If you click on them and later move your site to WP Engine, I will get a payment. You won’t pay a penny more for your hosting, but you will be helping support Writing For SEO.
Thanks to Brain Toad for making his image of a Ford Coupe Engine available.