Website Speed, IP address and Google Trustrank correlation

The first ColdAd website was launched on a free hosting plan: 50 MB disk space and 200 MB monthly bandwidth. I remember the day that I wished that I could even have $3 to test a faster server for the ColdAd website. Everyone knows that fast speed hosting has many features such as: increased visitor participation, reduced bounce rate and also search engine’s higher ranking.
But sometimes a hosting with a lower speed is better than high speed hosting for a better search engine ranking!!!  (Can you believe that?)
To test this theory, we spent $1,215.08 to host different servers so we could find the answer. At ColdAd, we are responsible for all our clients’ digital performance. Indeed R&D is a must!
To see the result concurrently, we have tested different servers: single host, virtual private server (VPS), cloud, no name, high performance brands and free servers!
Our test websites were based on WordPress, Genesis Framework, same theme, same images, same same …

Important Note: The companies’ names that we have mentioned in this article are just examples. This blog point is to test the concept of single hosting and cloud. You might find a cloud better than single host or a single host better than cloud. All these companies are awesome when you find your best match product. Although there is no right or wrong answer to our theory, the following article comes from our experience. It might help you too.

 

Cloud vs. Single Host

This is a big buzz question in the world of hosting right now. If you check the trends of “cloud” vs. “hosting”, you will find out that the majority of web admins are moving from single server to cloud. Why?

The main reason is the cloud’s benefit: Scalability!

Through sharing resources between different servers, a cloud host can help your website to respond in a case of Slashdot Effect. (“Phenomenon of a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service”, Wikipedia)

BUT, the speed of a cloud hosting site is less than a single hosting site. The reason is because assigning tasks to different servers takes time too.  Your main question might be: “Is keeping a website live for major events a cost effective / wise decision?”

 

Google Trustrank

For a long time, Google has not sorted websites based on (a simple) pagerank. It uses a trust weight to find out which websites are more trusted than others. One of the factors you might not think about is a website’s “IP Address”.

Rackspace, MediaTemple (recently acquired by GoDaddy), Linode and other big brands have their own range of IP addresses and because the price is high, they naturally host the most trusted websites. So, Google can trust “more” on a website hosted on one of those IP addresses than an IP with many negatively affected neighbour IPs.

Do not believe? Continue reading …

 

What You Should Expect from Different Hostings

A Single Hosting (Well-know brands or non-famous ones)

We signed up with a single server hosting reseller that (as I know) is using a data centre in Montreal. We purchased a simple cPanel account from them to host our website. You might get it from BlueHost, HostGator, netfirms, and so on.

Advantages

• Low cost
• Reliable; Our hosting was not down over 5 minutes and two times within 6 months
• Not very fast, but enough for Canadian visitors

Disadvantages

• No scalability
• Lower Trusted IP Address neighbour
• (Sometimes) low speed. They might advertise UNLIMITED hosting disk-space and UNLIMITED bandwidth, but because they limit the bandwidth speed to 15 mbps, this works out far less than UNLIMITED. This low speed causes your website to be low speed too)

Reports

• Average response time: about 1600 milliseconds
• Loading time: 4 seconds

As you can see, the admin did not put many hosting load (from his clients) on our server. It is working smoothly like a clock. (You are not always as lucky!)

A Famous Cloud Hosting Site

You can get cloud hosting from rackspace, MediaTemple, Linode starting from $20 per month. Many resellers offer $15 per month for cloud hosting and most of them re-sell Peer1.com cloud servers.

Advantages

• Scalability. It is cloud. Right?
• More likely trusted IP neighbours
• Cost, if you can break it down to your clients (Agency / web designer solution)

Disadvantages

• Slow server because of high average response time
• Our hosting goes down often. Like 12 times within 2 months (I wasn’t expecting that to happen but it happened)
• Expensive for a single website

Reports

• Average response time: About 1600 milliseconds
• Loading time: 7 seconds

Can you see how non-smooth our cloud was working?

If you test your website speed with Google PageSpeed Insight, the first and major problem is website response time. The following is my report:

“Reduce server response time. In your test, the server responded in 6.9 seconds. There are many factors that can slow down your server response time. Please read our recommendations to learn how you can monitor and measure where your server is spending the most time.”

What you should keep in mind is big brands selling you trusted IPs. So even if your visitors see your website as very slow, Search engines will trust you more. (Who can say yes / no to this theory?)

Dedicated Servers

If you want to rely on a dedicated server, you should consider time, skills and also cost of managing the host by yourself.

Advantages

• You are able to do whatever you want!
• Cost, if you can break it down to your clients (Agency / web designer solution)

Disadvantages

• You need to purchase and manage the OS, control panel, a public IP address and antivirus protection
• It takes a lot of time
• Expensive for a single website

 

Google Cloud Servers

A dedicated server on Google Compute Engine does not have any difference in speed than dedicated servers. It costs you about the same as other cloud providers and you only have 2 data centre options (West US and Central US).

Installing WordPress on Google App Engine which supports PHP is not easy. The difficulty comes when you want to update your website.

Use Google to host your WordPress if you are more of an IT guru than a marketing guru.

 

Google Sites

You can create as many websites as you want on Google’s Simple CMS (let’s say page creator) with your free account.

Advantages

• Free
• Simple
• Scalable (Probably!)

Disadvantages

• Very simple CMS. Does not support your favourite CMS like WordPress
• Non-removable footer links
• No Javascript supported

 

Does an IP Address really matter?

For 8 months, we tested one single domain on one server but with three different IPs. The below report indicates the number of “organic” visitors from Google. You can see the difference:

For the first three months, we had an increase in organic visitors (almost doubled). Then we kept everything the same but changed the IP address to Class C (192…) and you can see the result.

 

Conclusion

Having a high speed website on a scalable cloud and at a low cost is what we really need. But not all these three come together right now. So you should choose at last two of these conditions and focus on them to find the hosting that’s right for your needs.

On the other hand, do we really need to pay for a scalable cloud to be ready for an event that might not happen at all?

ColdAd does not have over 50 concurrent visitors and most single server hostings cover up to 400 concurrent visitors. I prefer to have a downed server if I have left something on the Internet that attracted over 1000 concurrent visitors (probably I did something very very wrong there!)

To service our Toronto clients with a reliable hosting service, high-speed site and affordable price, ColdAd acquired CentralMedia, a Toronto hosting provider. CentralMedia does not offer anything UNLIMITED but offers fast loading time on 4 CPUs and 100 mbps bandwidth speed.

The following is a report that compare it with other servers.

If you are interested in having a fast website (less than three seconds loading time) in Toronto or New York, subscribe on CM and get a 20% lifetime discount by entering the promotion code CLDD20 with your plan.

Our test errors : We didn’t test more than two clouds and four single servers. To prove this theory is (95%) right we must test at least 30 different servers.

What do you think about our theories? Do you think Google cares about IP addresses? Do you think cloud hosting is always better? Do you know any other solutions? Did you get any other results?