Is Shared Hosting Bad for SEO? Google Expert Gives Insights

Discover why "shared hosting is perfectly fine," and when it's not.
SIA Team
July 20, 2021

Summary: Shared hosting is fine, but if your host’s server is overloaded and slows down, that could be a problem.

Shared hosting is not necessarily slow, and dedicated hosting is not necessarily fast.

If you’ve ever been in the market for hosting, you’ve probably heard the terms shared and dedicated. Usually, a deciding factor comes down to shared vs. dedicated.

Shared hosting is basically when your site (or domain) shares the same server and/or IP as other sites (or domains).

Dedicated hosting is when your site or domain is hosted on one server and/or IP address. (I think some hosts can partition a single server so that it appears that it’s actually several servers, but I digress.)

Anyway, if you’ve ever asked what impact this decision might have on search engine optimization, (SEO), you were probably told that dedicated was better, because your site has its own server. Thus, your site’s server will be faster, which is preferable for SEO. Conversely, you were probably told that with shared hosting, your site’s server might be slow, because it shares that same server with other sites.

So, for years, the SEO advice has been to go with dedicated hosting where possible.

So, does that mean that shared hosting is bad?

According to Google expert John Mueller, “Using shared hosting is perfectly fine.”

Toward the end of the video, he reiterated his point, saying that, “There’s no need to move to dedicated hosting or a dedicated IP address for SEO reasons.”

That said, during the video, he did state that a slow server, whether it be a shared or dedicated server, can pose a bit of an issue. A slow server can result from server overload, and it can make it a bit difficult for search engines to crawl a site.

Another thing Mueller mentioned was the notion of “bad neighborhoods,” which is when your site (which is a good site) shares the same hosting as other sites that are bad.

Unless those bad sites are having a direct effect on your site, there’s no need to worry about bad neighbourhoods, as Google looks at each site on it’s own merit.

Source: Google Search Central YouTube Channel