Quality Web Hosting Impacts Advertising Revenue
Advertisers never ask about quality Web hosting on sites where they are thinking about running a campaign.
Account executives don’t ask management anything about it. Technical people don’t tell management to spend more money on hosting in order to make more money with advertising.
But quality Web hosting does make a difference with advertising revenue, among many other factors.
Plenty of bad, real-world scenarios prove the point.
Site A exists on a shared hosting server. Site B on the same server acquires a virus that spreads to Site A because of poor security. The audience on Site A declines, search engines block it, advertisers have unfulfilled impressions.
Site A does everything right, but it still exists on a shared hosting server. Site B has a major event that draws a tremendous amount of traffic. Because the server has limited resources, the response rate tanks. Pages load slowly or not at all. Once again, impressions go unfulfilled.
After two strikes, Site A decides to spend some money and go with a virtual private server. It may run on a physical server with other sites, but it has some protected capacity.
Unfortunately, Site A management doesn’t take steps to prevent the site from being overwhelmed by hundreds of automated robots and spiders every month from Ukraine, Russia, Norway, Germany, China and many other countries even though the site only has a local audience somewhere in Kentucky.
Again, site performance falls apart and advertisers go away angry because impressions are unfulfilled, pages load slowly and the click rate is abysmal.
Search Engines Love Quality Hosting
Sites can earn extra revenue by signing up with Google AdSense, Bing’s Media.net or many other networks. Fast sites will deliver those ads faster.
Why does Google care? Because people who go to a slow site with Google AdSense may trigger a Google server response but never even see or much less even click on any of the ads. The company’s own server resources are wasted in such a situation.
Those networks won’t deliver good ads if they get served slowly because people click on slow ads less often.
Google also has made it quite clear that it values fast server response for its search engine index. Sites are graded on various factors, and one of them is the response time.
The reason why is customer expectations. If a searcher goes to Google or Bing, gets a search result for a slow site and clicks on the link, he or she will go away disappointed. Google or Bing lose credibility with searchers.
How to Improve Quality Hosting
The first step toward quality hosting is simple. Just do a search on Google PageSpeed to use its tools and identify the initial server response time. Other good tools are available at GTmetrix and Pingdom.
Keep in mind that the initial response is the result of both the hosting capacity, site configuration and other speed factors such as image optimization.
Next, look at the hosting configuration and compare it to other options. Get to know the basics such as the number of CPUs on the server, the amount of RAM and the amount of disk space storage.
The first two are especially important for performance. There are other important considerations, but these are a start.
Many sites pay a lot more for hosting than necessary because they don’t manage their hosting accounts.
Hosting companies of course charge their clients for being on a Web server. But effective hosting requires access to a product such as Cpanel to identify and block major spammers, use disk space efficiently and optimize bandwidth.
When they don’t take those steps, hosting companies gladly charge their clients more money for the growing amount of disk space and bandwidth that could have been avoided or at least limited.
After getting to know the hosting account requirements, the publisher can now make intelligent decisions about what is needed to get the best performance possible for the site, the visitors and the advertisers.
A faster server results in faster loading times for ads. Fast-loading ads generate more clicks. More clicks make advertisers happy. Happy advertisers lead to more revenue. More revenue pays for the higher costs that come with quality website hosting.