Your hosting company is an important consideration if you
want to be positioned properly on search engines.
These questions need to be asked.
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Is the site almost always on-line?
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Do you have a dedicated or static IP address?
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Is this name-based hosting?
Uptime, uptime guarantees
You will see all sorts of guarantees regarding up-time with hosting
providers. Most are somewhere between 99% and 99.99%. What does this
mean? Basically it means your website will be online for that percentage
of time, guaranteed. Watch out for the small print though. There are
many reasons why a site may not be available. Network failures, backbone
failures, denial of service attacks, equipment failure, local router
failures (at your ISP) and a host of other reasons. Most guarantees have
exceptions for these failures and most don't tell you what they'll do to
back up the guarantee.
Let's take a look at the numbers for a 99.5% guarantee. There are 365
days in a year, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes per hour. That works out to
52,560 minutes in a year. 99.5% of that is about 52,297 minutes, meaning
your site could be off-line 263 minutes, or about 4 and a half hours in
a year for something caused by your hosting provider and they would be
in-line with their guarantee, not including all the reasons beyond their
control. Let's face it; even the banks aren't on-line 100%, but it is
important to have a provider that is available most of the time. Don't
be tricked by guarantees though.
Why is this important. When you register with a search engine your
site has to be available when either the search engine spider or, as in
some cases, a human visits your site to insert your site into the search
engine database.
Dedicated IP Addresses vs. Name-Based Hosting
What's an IP address?
An IP address is the numeric address of a website or a group of
websites. It would look something like 69.93.170.22. This address will
take you to a server and link you to 24-7 Webs Inc. Try it. Click here:
http://69.93.170.22.
IP addresses are difficult if not impossible to remember so we have
domain names instead like
www.24-7webs.com
which is just another way of stating the IP address but a whole lot
easier to remember.
Dedicated IP and Name-Based Hosting
Generally speaking there are two types of basic hosting plans. Those
with a dedicated IP address and those with name-based hosting. A
dedicated IP address is an address that is unique to your site. You are
the only site on that address. Name-based hosting will put several sites
on the same IP address, as many as a whopping 1,700,000 according to
netfactuel.com. Both of these hosting types would have a static IP
address in that it never changes, but only the dedicated IP address
assures you that yours is the only site on it.
NOTE: You will know if you are on a dedicated IP simply by typing it
in the address bar of your browser like this: http://yourip
If you are on your own IP you will reach your site immediately. Some
companies claim to give you a static, dedicated unique IP address,
but it isn't much good if you are not the only website at that IP.
What Does This Have to do with Search Engines?
The difficulty with name-based hosting is that several, if not
hundreds of sites may be sharing the same IP address. Any one of those
sites either deliberately or inadvertently may get their site banned by
the search engine. When a search engine bans a site it bans the IP
address so not only would that site be banned, but every site on that IP
address. UPDATE May, 2003: Although search engines are getting
better at dealing with name based or virtual hosted sites (Google in
particular), there is still no guarantee that you won't get banned
because of someone else's actions on a shared IP. Why take the chance?
Get your own IP.
Stephen Baker is FAST's Director of Business
Development and Marketing. In an interview, Mr. Baker was quoted as
saying:
"We believe there are approximately 30 Million
crawlable servers globally, two-thirds of which have been blacklisted as
spam servers."
Brad Konia, CEO of Market my Site and Author of
"Search Engine Optimization with Webposition Gold 2" had this
to say:
"Now what
happens if any ONE of the hundreds or even thousands of web sites that
are sharing your IP address breaks the rules of one or more search
engines? Yes, the search engines may remove or ban that website domain,
but guess what...they may also remove every other website using the same
IP address. Since it's easier for search engine spammers to get new
domain names than it is to get a new IP, search engines often choose to
ban IP addresses for abusive behavior.
This means that
your site can become banned even if you follow all their rules to the
letter. You're guilty by association!"
Another
from Altavista :"AltaVista shares a great many spam rules that are
common to other search engines, "being found via search engines are
important to your business, be very careful about where you have your
pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and
pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded simply
because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all
the virtual domains it includes."
To learn more about IP addresses,
here's another resource:
Harvard
Law School
To learn what Webposition Gold can do
for you, go here: Myrasoft
If you are running a family site where being found on a search engine
is not important, this won't matter. However, if you do need to be
found, you need your own IP address. Make sure you don't get it banned;
get your own IP address.
Dedicated and
Unique IP hosting by 24-7 Webs
