Loading...- What Is a Cloud Server?
- How Does a Cloud Server Work?
- What Is the Difference Between Server and Cloud?
- How Does Cloud Hosting Affect SEO?
- Cloud Hosting and SEO - The Takeaway
What Is a Cloud Server?
So, what is a cloud server?A cloud server is an advanced physical or virtual infrastructure that stores applications and processed information. It's created using virtualization software that segments a completely software-free physical server into multiple virtual servers. More and more organizations use the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model to handle workloads and store information. This allows them to access virtual server functions remotely by using an online interface.How Does a Cloud Server Work?
A cloud server stores applications and websites on servers in the cloud, where they're made available to users. Contrary to traditional hosting, these solutions aren't implemented on individual servers. What does it mean? Applications and websites are stored in a network of interconnected virtual and physical servers in the cloud. This makes them more flexible and scalable.What Is the Difference Between Server and Cloud?
Are you wondering whether there is any difference between servers and clouds? Well, there are a few:- The cloud can be activated instantly, whereas the server requires about 24-hour waiting.
- The cloud is incredibly flexible and allows you to easily modify RAM, CPU, or HDD. On the other hand, traditional servers can be expanded only by increasing the amount of HDD and RAM.
- Traditional servers frequently generate extra costs, as you have to predict the power you’ll need in the future. If you don’t use this power, it’ll generate costs without giving you any benefits. Since a cloud server is more flexible, you don’t have to worry about such situations.
- If you use a cloud server, you can easily protect your data by making a traditional backup or snapshot that can only be used in the cloud.
- You can dynamically split the resources of the cloud according to your needs.
- When you use a traditional server, you pay a fixed subscription fee each month, regardless of the resources used. On the other hand, being a cloud user you pay only for what you use, as the cloud is scaled according to your needs.
How Does Cloud Hosting Affect SEO?
Since you know what cloud hosting is, it’s time to talk about its impact on SEO. Well, it turns out that the selection of an appropriate cloud server can influence your future positions in the search results. This decision has a crucial impact on server response time, which translates into website loading time. As you probably know, page loading speed is an important Google ranking factor in 2022 and it has a decisive impact on UX. After all, users get impatient rather quickly and will surely leave your site if it continues to load for more than 2 or 3 seconds. So, does cloud hosting affect SEO? Yes, it does! It can support your technical SEO activities in multiple ways. Keep reading to learn more.Increased Reliability
To start with, it’s worth mentioning that cloud servers are much more reliable than traditional solutions. It turns out they don’t fail so frequently, moreover, since your data is stored on multiple servers, it’s safer and can be easily accessed. Apart from that, a cloud server can significantly improve your page’s uptime, as traditional servers frequently go down. If you use a cloud server, users can still access your page from multiple servers, even if one or two of them don’t work properly. It’s a crucial advantage that makes this solution stand out from the crowd. Why? Because Google doesn’t like websites that are often down and tends to rank them in lower positions.
Want to learn more? Check out our entry: How does website downtime affect SEO?
Increased Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed is an indicator of how fast your website will load. In other words - how long the user will wait for the content to be displayed. The faster the page load time, the better. Website loading time has a direct impact on SEO. In the official statement published by Google we can read that:Speeding up websites is important—not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.So, what’s the connection between page speed and server? Cloud hosting can significantly increase your page loading speed as it uses a content delivery network (CDN). This has a positive impact on both SEO and UX (remember that users don’t like to wait, and will certainly leave your page if the content isn’t displayed to them right away).
Want to learn more about website speed importance in SEO? Check our entry!
Better Hosting Location
You should keep in mind that website hosting isn’t entirely digital and involves physical servers that are placed in real locations. When determining the SERPs that should be displayed to specific users, Google shows websites that are hosted closer to them higher. What does it mean in real life? If your server is far away from the user, your page may not be displayed high, even if it complies with all the ranking factors, and corresponds to the query. Cloud hosting solves this problem, as it stores websites on multiple servers across multiple locations. Thanks to it, page owners don’t have to buy a few domains to appear in the search results more frequently.
