Google’s spokesperson John Mueller affirms there’s no SEO advantage associated with hosting a website on a dedicated server instead of a shared server.
The statement comes from the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot series on YouTube. Mueller answers the question of a small business owner, trying to keep operational costs down.
To share hosting, or not to share ?️?️?️??
In this ep. of #AskGooglebot, @JohnMu explains:
☁️ difference between shared & dedicated hosting
? how @Google treats sites on a shared server…and more!
? Watch the ep. now! → https://t.co/D5t8xoPK34 pic.twitter.com/whSPzsHtWx
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) July 20, 2021
Essentially, all entities with limited resources come upon this decision, choosing between shared hosting and a dedicated server.
Hosting a site on a small budget can become a massive concern for many entities. However, web hosting providers have enhanced their services over time and now offer top-quality packages at affordable prices.
Shared hosting is the cheaper alternative, as it refers to a setup where multiple sites use the same IP address or the same server.
On the other side of the spectrum, dedicated hosting assigns an IP address to a single user. People usually relate dedicated servers with faster page speeds. Thus, they believe this hosting results in a ranking advantage in Google’s search results.
However, you cannot tell whether a website is hosted on a single server or multiple data centers from the outside.
John Mueller, who serves the role of a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, had his to say:
Using shared hosting is perfectly fine and does not negatively affect your site in Google Search.
Still, Mueller further explained that shared hosting users should watch out for overloading servers with too many websites. Hosting too many sites slows down the server, whether it’s a dedicated or a shared one. However, the chances are higher for the latter to occur.
A slow server eventually leads to a poor user experience. This, in turn, harms SEO rankings, as it makes it more challenging for Google to crawl.
In other words, shared hosting is not slower by default, nor dedicated hosting guarantee better SEO ranking. However, dedicated servers are usually associated with faster speeds, which indirectly affect the process.
There’s no one-solution-fits-all, and a quality shared hosting can even outperform an inferior dedicated server.
