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Google loves fast hosts
September 29th, 2008I talked about the Google bot recently and how the bastard killed one of my website even on a decent reseller account. Seriously, I love the Google bot, it helps me get indexed 
What I want to talk about today is how a new host positively impacted my website and how it can positively impact your website.
Resources hungry
I talked about it, the reason I bought a reseller account is because one of my website is terribly resources hungry. Before I got on the new host, a page could easily take 4-5 seconds to load and I thought this was a pain. In fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some traffic because of that: people would just go away! The main bottleneck was the mysql performance which is SO much faster on the new host: it now only takes 1-2 seconds to load a page. To my great surprised, not only my visitors are happier, but the Google bot seems to like me a little more!
Google loves it
Let’s have a look at these two charts from Google Webmaster tools:
- Number of pages crawled per day
- Average time to download a page
The red arrow marks the point where I switched host. See how the average time spent to download a page significantly dropped AND the number of pages crawled per day significantly increased! I mean, Google spend less time downloading a single page, so it uses the same total time available to download more pages! Isn’t it great?
How does that helps your website?
This will help your website because even if Google spends the same total time on your website, it actually does a lot more during that time. Not only your new pages will get indexed faster, but your other pages will get updated more often.
Some stats?
The site went from 500 uniques a day to 1000 uniques a day in a single week, and it’s increasing a little everyday since them. That’s what I call a good result.
Do I have to go with a better host?
It all depends the type of website you run. If you run a blog with not much traffic and you don’t update very often, that probably won’t make a difference. On the opposite, if you feel your website is really slow to load, you are getting some decent traffic and you update quite often then I’d say go for it!
Be aware that a reseller hosting is something around 25$ a month, so if you’re website doesn’t make 25$ a month, don’t do the upgrade!
35 Responses to “Google loves fast hosts”
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hi Ben, i have noticed that google silently updated the PR’s. your site also got a PR now! congrats
and you deserve it. well here’s the main thing i just want to ask if i could change the niche the title, keywords of my abandoned blog slowly. for site got PR3 after the review even though it was not upadted few months ago. i’m thinking if i could change the whole idea of the site. will this hurt my page rank or something?. thanks ~ ps. most of the content is written in a local language here in the Philippines please do understand. thanks.
jigss last blog post..Shareaholic the Easy Way of Bookmarking
Right on my friend, Hostgator reseller for me!
Dennis Edells last blog post..Important Tip: FREE Will Cost You In The Long Run – Do You Agree?
@jigs: I didn’t notice the PR update, but I checked a couple of my websites and you’re right!
frogstr.com will probably have to wait a bit for a proper PR because it’s relatively new. That’s the downside of switching domain name!
You can change your site’s keywords, niche and everything without any problems. It’s better for Google to have a daily updated website than a dead PR3 website. On top of that, that might not even impact your PR!
The website I’m talking about in this article was a PR0, now a PR1 and it’s driving 1000 uniques a day…PR isn’t everythin!
@Dennis: Same for me, hostgator reseller is really nice!
Any chance of a subscribe-to-comments plugin? Please.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Important Tip: FREE Will Cost You In The Long Run – Do You Agree?
I added it, now I’m testing threaded comments and you’re the winner for the first test!
What about auto-replying to myself?
I am suspecting that “1000 uniques a day” phrase starts to make me depressed on pure reflex…
Didn’t have that reaction before starting blog, weird.
haha sorry Rarst
Seriously, the 1000 uniques a day site isn’t a blog…I guess we can call it some sort of news provider with something like 45,000 indexed pages so statistically speaking, it’s easier to show up in google results! I don’t have any blog reaching 1,000 uniques a day on a constant basis…
>I don’t have any blog reaching 1,000 uniques a day on a constant basis…
You could omit “on a constant basis” for my sake…
On topic – I kinda stopped checking my google webmasters tools. Nothing interesting there.
Rarsts last blog post..AutoRuns – handles software and driver startup entries
haha aright, I’ll try to be careful next time
Wow, that is not somethings I’ve ever thought of. I don’t make any money from my blog right now (haven’t even put ads on yet), but when I do start to make enough per month this is something I’m definitely going to look into. I’m glad you made me aware of this for the future. Thanks.
The Kings last blog post..Earn Easy Money With CashCrate
I will make some experiment on this too. ‘Cause I never heard about his before.
Dewajis last blog post..Villa Des Indes
I think having a fast host is great and all but sometimes its not the host that makes your site slow. I’ve seen people with script problems that causes that problem too. I will have ti impliment some of these thing to reach more uniques per month
Bruno Augers last blog post..The Milestones of the Computer
@Dennis: I know it’s a pain…Subscribe to comment is comming!
@The King: No problems for that, good luck with monetizing your blog!
@Dewaji: Excellent, you can provide some feedback with your experiments as well…
@Bruno: So true! I didn’t talk about crappy scripts running making the website slow but it is an important factor!
Excellent! I have to leave the page open because I’ll never “remember” to return…that just makes me feel like a one-off comment spammer, ugh.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Important Tip: FREE Will Cost You In The Long Run – Do You Agree?
Hmm, commentluv uncooperative today, that’s not my latest post…
Dennis Edells last blog post..Important Tip: FREE Will Cost You In The Long Run – Do You Agree?
Comment love went as far as 2 post behind yesterday for me…Looks like there’s something going on…
There you go Dennis…You have your subscribe to comments option!
Thanks!
Dennis Edells last blog post..Coming Soon? Yes They Are I Swear – I Need Your Advice First!
thanks for the reply Sir Ben.
I really appreciated it. More power to you.
jigss last blog post..ang akong pag balhin
Interesting facts , statistics and charts . Thanks for providing the information.
@Roger: No problems mate!
How does one go about figuring out who’s a fast host or not? Many of them say they are. I know that my host seems fast when compared to some others, but I really don’t know. Right now I’m in the process of “thinking” about moving hosts, after mine was down almost a week last month.
Mitchs last blog post..$100 Million Dollar Challenge
That’s a great comparison – I’d not thought about that too much. Any chance you could update those charts in a week or two? I’d be very interested to see how google bot was trending vs. your page load speed.
Cheers – Mark
Definitely, Google loves fast host. Actually not only Google but also other bots. If your page took long time to load then bots will stop crawling your page (am I right?)
@Mitch: There’s not really any good ways unfortunately. You can read reviews, but unfortunately they usually don’t consider performance, just price and customer service. This is mostly because 95% of people don’t get traffic to their website so performance isn’t an issue. I ran several DB tests and Hostgator is pretty to to be honest. SO bottom line, you have to try a few hosts.
@Irish: Yes sure, I’ll give an update!
@Hussein: You’re right, other bots in general too. I don’t think they’ll stop crawling, but they will certainly come less often and stay less longer!
Many people say google will rank you higher if you are on a good host but that doesn’t seem fair and I’m not convinced it’s true. For instance I have a hobby site on a free host. Good content, no ads but free host. You can imagine it’s not exactly fast. Ranked 15 I think on my targeted keywords. Pretty good.
Content is king. Remember that. The rest is speculation.
[...] want to follow up on my last week (Maybe more) post “Google loves fast hosts“. In that post I talked about how switching to a HostGator reseller account helped me [...]
Google sure is fair in this aspect. If a site is more optimized, more of it can be assessed and relayed back to the general populace. This is direct motivation for site owners to optimize if they want to have Google more updated on their site’s pages.
Armen Shirvanians last blog post..Quality Builds On Itself
Tu further boost the performance of your WordPress-powered websites, I recommend to install two plugins: WP Super Cache and WP Widget Cache.
They helped me a lot and for a couple of days now, I don’t have problems with the faster crawl-rate.
lol. I guess it’s time to be more careful now. Thanks for the share!
what is the best bandwidth if we have 50 visitor per day?
Thanks for the post. I love the chart.
Well thanks for your post. I’ll try to submitting my site to Google Webmaster as so far we just submit it at Google Analytics
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.