Is shared hosting ok?

• I'm trying to decide between shared hosting, with my site sharing an IP address and server with multiple other websites, or dedicated hosting so my site has its own server and dedicated IP address. Since the shared hosting is a bit more affordable, I'm wondering if there is any ranking or SEO advantage for the dedicated hosting over shared hosting?

Answer:

From a purely SEO perspective, the short answer is No.

However there are other considerations to take into account besides the effect on SEO. As John Mueller pointed out in a recent #AskGooglebot segment,

Using shared hosting is perfectly fine and does not negatively affect your site in Google Search. There is, however, one thing to watch out for. Sometimes, when too many websites are hosted on a system with limited capacity, it can happen that the server is overloaded. This can result in the server and its websites becoming very slow.

The same thing can happen with a dedicated hosting, though. Having a website hosted on a slow server makes your users unhappy and can make it harder to crawl.

John goes on to say that, shared hosting is an extremely common set up and that it's often impossible to tell from the outside how a website is actually hosted — it could be a single server, a cluster of servers, a single data center, or even multiple data centers.

As John points points out, speed is the more important factor.

In the past there have been concerns over sites sharing servers or IP addresses with "bad" sites on servers in a "bad neighborhood." John says this isn't something you should be worried about since, in practice, "most commonly used hosting providers watch out for this problem on their own."

In any case, Google treats each website based on its own merits, not based on its virtual neighbors according to John. So, for Google, shared hosting is perfectly acceptable. However, speed is really...