Search Engine Optimization is the bedrock of digital marketing. About 61% of marketers claim that improving SEO and maintaining a robust online presence is their foremost priority (Hubspot State of Marketing). As if we may guess, you might be too.
But what if we told you that you can do even better than just website SEO? What if there is a certain hosting service that improves your SEO from the get-go?
Yes! The way that it works is that the hosting provider will run your website on unique C-blocks of IP addresses. In fact, we have 10 popular web hosting services that will not just help your website run better but rank better too.
Note: No ranking implied whatsoever.
Unlike most hosting providers, Cloudways follows a unique approach to providing managed services to its customers. By partnering with one of the leading top cloud providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultur, Google Cloud, and Linode, the company offers you a fully managed hosting solution so you can build your website without any worry.
Highly optimized for performance, SEO-friendly framework, and affordable cloud rates, Cloudways hosting options come with tons of goodies like Free SSL, site migration, a powerful dashboard, scalable packages, and ease of convenience.
Their WordPress hosting option is rated as the best in the industry, followed by WooCommerce, Magento, and PHP options. And that's not all, Cloudways also offers region-wise hosting options that is if your target audience is in the UK, you can signup for Cloudways Managed Hosting in UK.
Plans and Features
WPMU DEV is one of the fastest WordPress web hosting platforms for web developers and designers. It offers hassle-free site management as WPMU DEV's site management hub allows users to build, monitor, optimize, manage, update, and backup unlimited WordPress sites from a unified dashboard. The web hosting platform also makes client management easy. It has a fully-integrated client billing system that can be utilized to set up recurring subscriptions and build a branded client portal.
WPMU DEV is robust, reliable, and feature-packed, and it offers a wide range of flexible and affordable hosting plans. It is known for its high-quality plugins and top-notch WordPress support.
The best part of WPMU DEV is that its hosting plans are compartmentalized and use dedicated resources, ensuring site speed and security. Specific hosting plans allow you to relish free email accounts, Web Application Firewall (WAF), SSL certificates, and migration assistance. Users also can enjoy developer-friendly tools such as one-click staging and easy SFTP/SSH access. It also offers cloning and templates, file and DNS management, and site analytics.
Hosting Plans and Features
For the Large & Complex sites with heavy traffic, you can choose from the plans:
The web hosting platform offers unlimited free migrations. However, going by the user reviews, the cons are there; you may witness glitches sometime, and systems are running into unexpected errors. It disrupts the momentum when you are working on a project, but the support is good, and you can avail a quick resolution. If you are seeking automation and an increased number of payment gateways, they may not now soothe your needs. Also, the email account storage is small, but overall, WPMU Dev has a great knowledge base, and their customer support is premium.
GoDaddy has been catering to businesses and entrepreneurs since the beginning. If you go to their Buisness Hosting tiers, you’ll find that GoDaddy prefers VPS servers for hosting.
VPS servers offer the most flexibility when it comes to comparison. It is also referred to by many as having your own personal computer in the cloud space meaning more control.
The best things about GoDaddy’s VPS servers is that you get ease of use, dedicated resources, and total isolation from other websites on the server. Plus, upgrading your plan is just one simple click.
To go over some of the cons, we’d say the renewal rates could be a tad expensive given if your budget is limited and apart from resources, there isn’t a lot of variation in plans. But regardless, you get GoDaddy’s premium customer support services as well.
HostGator comes from India and perhaps that explains the affordable pricing. The developers filled it up with niche features that could better your site’s performance. You can choose from Linux, Windows, Opensource and best drupal hosting.
24/7 customer support, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 45-day money-back commitment is a given but what’s more, is that you get their custom security features like CodeGuard and SiteLock along with SSL certificates.
With so many options to choose from, we’d recommend HostGator’s WordPress hosting service due to its easy optimization and optimal resources.
Just like GoDaddy, Inmotion has many offices across the US and experienced professionals who have received internal training to provide you with the utmost technical support. Inmotion only does Linus and Unix hosting because they’re rightfully experts at it.
Along with tier 1 ISP providers with failsafe backups, Inmotion’s data centers are PCI compliant and comes with Smart Routing technology with DDoS protection for 99.9% uptime.
Also, Inmotion offers a ready-to-go WordPress site in 2 days for $99. You can specify what you want and then an expert will design it accordingly with business email and full support for phones and tablets.
Inmotion has high-performance Dedicated Hosting that comes with cPanel/WHM, SSD storage, multi-layer defense, seamless updates, and Xeon processors which is perfect for SEO.
Inmotion certainly isn’t for the budget-conscious but when you take a broader, the quality to price ratio is incomparable. There is also the option to customize a plan for your needs or you could check out their ultra-tier plans here.
A2Hosting holds 8th position on our best web hosting based on uptime and response time with a 99.953% uptime status and that is marginally faster than the competition. A2Hosting is in many ways identical to GreenGeeks (which will be discussed later).
Although, the only difference between the 2 could be brought down to price and the website builder. A2Hosting also has a domain registrar, which isn’t exactly the best but they also offer domain transfers to get your site shifted easily.
You get a lot of options in hosting like WordPress, Shared, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated but the Shared hosting plans are what work best for SEO heavy websites.
GreenGeeks tends to come up on a lot of our lists and it’s not because we have some sort of bias for it. It’s just that in a lot of ways, GreenGeeks is a perfect combination of affordability and features with an eco-friendly front.
If that doesn’t convince you, they have 40,000+ customers and have hosted over 50,000 websites since being in the business for 12 years. They have servers in Chicago, Phoenix, Montreal, and Amsterdam with efficient Intel Xeon Processors.
You can choose from Shared, WordPress, VPS, and Reseller hosting services. But again, Shared hosting here works the best for SEO due to its developer friendly tools and e-commerce capabilities. The only downside could be that the plans are too homogenous in features.
The high priest of e-commerce itself. WordPress is unquestionably the biggest thing on the internet. From the average joe to the mega corporations, everyone can learn to use it without any of that elvish coding knowledge.
BUT using WordPress alone doesn’t guarantee you better rankings. What you get is a better framework to implement your SEO strategy. WP’s arsenal of plugins like YoastSEO, W3 Total Cache, Smush, etc. make SEO a breeze.
Now, the hosting part is a bit tricky to explain but in a nutshell: WordPress does not follow the traditional sense of a hosting service pattern because it inherently is a Content Management System but offers hosting services as an value-added extension.
Our recent blogger survey revealed that WPX is quite a popular service, even though we hadn’t ever heard about it before. What’s more is that it has some of the best web hosting security in the form of WebARX and unlimited migrations.
We have a WPX Hosting Review that goes into much more detail. But in a nutshell: WPX can perfectly manage your WordPress for you with great features while being a little on the expensive side but backs a lot of experience behind its back.
HostPapa on the surface might appear quite generic but it is quite popular among the industry experts. It has servers in Toronto, Canada, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, California, and Luttenberg.
For variety in hosting, they have Shared, Managed Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, Reseller and even a separate eCommerce Hosting tier. Our preferred choice of hosting here would be Shared.
But there’s a catch with 2 things here: Unmetered Bandwidth here is limited to how much resources you consume and the Unlimited Storage can’t be used for archiving personal files.
Wix was the first time when WordPress started to look over its shoulder. You see, Wix doesn’t fall in the same line as something like SquareSpace which is aimed at the average joe to drag-n-drop the entire website.
Wix is an Editor, an open development platform, an ADI, and a business management and promotion platform. But much like WordPress, it gives you a great space to implement a cohesive strategy with the right tools and plugins.
There’s 2 tiers for hosting: Website and Business & eCommerce. The latter in our opinion is far better suited for SEO even though one can opt for the former suiting their budget.
BlueHost is our recurring favorite here at hostingpill. Why? It offers quality under the right price, the customer support is great, go-to choice for a lot of WordPress users, simple to use, WP Pro for managed WordPress, and the list goes on.
In our regularly updated BlueHost Review, we keep adding new stuff to the service. A service that has grown exponentially in a short period of time. BlueHost also packs some of the best WordPress experts in the business.
But if WordPress isn’t your thing then they offer 3 options for hosting: Shared, Dedicated, and VPS. For SEO, again, Shared here will work just fine.
The conclusion is simple: You need to choose the one option that fits best with your budget and priority. If at any point you feel stuck, remember that every option mentioned above has a money-back period where you can recover your investment.
So the most you’ll be losing is probably time. Also, keep in mind that a lot of hosting services keep their introductory prices and revision prices separate which could end up hurting you in the long run.
And if you need any more help with SEO then you can check out our list of the Best SEO Marketing Tools for some help. If you found the article helpful then be sure to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.
Author Bio: I’m Chris Wagner, Head of Content @HostingPill. I regularly write about Hosting, Web servers and WordPress. I have more than 9 years Industry experience.
