There are plenty of options out there to buy hosting for a website but no one is actually addressing how news websites get impacted by a hosting that is a ranking killer. You need to set the foundations of your next news website right and choosing the best hosting for a news website is extremely critical.
Think beyond the boundaries of how cheap one hosting company is from the other. You need to think big and think maturely. After all, you will be informing people about events. The focus of this post is to relate a news website performance with the way Google or search engines rank a website.
There is no point in writing news when no one is going to find you on search engines. A news website is difficult because you need to update the content constantly. No one would search for news that is years old.
I am recommending SiteGound as hosting for a news website. There are multiple reasons to choose SiteGround as a strategic host for your next news website startup. SiteGround will offer you the right foundation to get discovered by people searching for news.
How Hosting Credibility is Seen by Google
You have a startup and you are certainly on a budget. The enticement is high, you are trying to save every dollar and thinking about getting cheap news web hosting. The nightmare for any news website is to get blacklisted even before starting the website.
There are multiple reasons why your news website can be blacklisted. One of them is the bad neighborhood of your hosting. Hosting companies like Bluehost, HostGator (both are same companies) are known to crowd websites in the same shared space. They try to make the maximum return of investment out of one hosting area.
The downside is you do not know what other websites are offering with in the same hosting space. They can be private blog networks built by amateurs or they might be publishing banned content. Hosting companies are doing business and often don’t care how their hosting space is being utilized.
You can never rank a news article if your website is hosted with neighboring websites hosting child pornography or violent material. This penalty is hard to track and it is totally unfortunate but this really can happen. SiteGround has quality control checks and they make sure that all the websites on their hosting shared space are clean and are not any kind of manual penalty by the search engines.
To have a good successful news website, organic traffic is imperative. If you are already banned because of cheap hosting then it is a waste of time, money and efforts. That is why some of the news websites are built on virtual private servers or VPS. This allows them to have to host space solely for their own news website. The downside is the management of the server and you will increase your cost by the server’s configuration. Instead, you should buy static IP for your news blog and it will get you in a relatively safer position with no configuration issues. The cost of static IP is just a few dollars per month at SiteGround. You can even get it with their StartUp plan.
News Hosting Server Configuration
Crawl Bots Setup:
The hosing your news website is located in should be crawler friendly. As you post news articles regularly on your website, crawlers from search engines will make more frequent visits to your website to check for new content.
If you have to host, that has many websites hosted in the same space or if you have a server that has an old infrastructure that takes ages to respond to crawl request then it can terrible for any website to rank in any niche. For a news website, this is a complete suicide because all new news is delayed because of the way the server acts to external requests from the crawling bots.
Hosting companies like SiteGround have an extremely capable developer team who have made checks to spot these friendly search engine bots that allow the content to be checked on a regular basis. The reason why I have chosen the word good bots is because bad bots are in the hunt as well to find vulnerable websites. So a good hosting company welcomes good bots and kicks the bad ones. At Siteground they have taken proper care of the bots so do not need to worry about if good bots are also blacklisted.
Server Caching:
The server where your website is hosted should compile the latest copy of your website content and make it readily available at the server end. So as soon as someone, request to view your website, instead of requesting files from different parts of the server like separate databases, repeating content should be available immediately and only special requests should be processed.
SiteGround provides server caching however, for dynamic caching you should consider the mid-range package named GrowBig. Server caching is absolutely critical for a news website in another aspect of XML sitemaps. News websites have to constantly update their existing sitemaps instead of creating new ones. So an updated compiled sitemap available at the doorstep of the server can help the crawl bot to easily discover the newly added news articles.
Cloud Data Network:
If you want to grow your news website quickly then you should cover diverse topics. People can land on your website if you have a vast portfolio. This means that your users can come from any part of the world. A good news hosting company will quickly judge the developing trends in the world and stored cached copy of the news article throughout the world.
So let’s say you buy SiteGround hosting whose server is located in the United States. Someone from Vietnam wants to visit your website, it would be not wise to download data from the US instead if a copy is located in South Korea can serve the user quicker.
This is called the smart distribution of the news website content. It sounds complicated and it surely is. But the good news is that you can set it up easily without any expertise. SiteGround website is hosted by the world’s most popular cloud data network which is Cloudflare.
After buying the news hosting you can integrate your hosting easily with SiteGround with just a few clicks. If you do not plan to buy SiteGround news web hosting but still want to use the Cloudflare services then it will be a little complicated to set it up.
You would have to remove your news Hosting DNS from the domain DNS settings and replace it with the Cloudflare DNS address. It is not that difficult but you may remain in doubt. As forcing www domain address is a necessity to avail full benefits of the cloud networks.
No Uptime Discontinuity
Your website should be available all the time. There should be no discontinuity in terms of the uptime. Good news hosting companies have 99.99% of the guaranteed uptime. For scheduled maintenance, they make sure that the website is still accessible through the backup servers.
Therefore, it is guaranteed that your website is accessible even when your hosting companies plan to upgrade their hardware infrastructure.
Additionally, if the cloud data network is set up correctly then even though the website may be down due to technical glitches it will be still delivered thanks to the copies of the website stored throughout the world in the cloud data network.
There is no point in running a news website on a cheap web hosting that has unscheduled maintenance. Google bot might be on a scheduled crawl on your news web but because hosting is on maintenance the bot will quickly move out and mark it as a low-quality news website.
Page builder Assistance
News website requires to have dozens of new posts every day. It can be a tough task if you are to do it on a WordPress classic editor. Doing it all alone can be painful. It would be a smarter idea to hire a virtual assistant who would upload all the new articles for you.
SiteGround offers its own page builder for free that can help quickly build up the pages in quick successions. The ease of building pages with user-friendly page builders can reduce the headache. This free feature is not provided by other hosting providers and can is actually not mentioned anywhere on other new hosting recommending websites.
Speed Optimisation:
Google has announced in clear words that speed is a ranking factor. The first part is to make sure that your server speed is correct. This is a relatively easier part because the sole responsibility of the server speed is on the hosting company.
If you buy a good hosting company service like SiteGround then this problem is resolved. But the second part is the optimization of the website speed is not the server part. In order to load the new website quickly for both mobile and desktop users, you need to have the website speed optimized.
SiteGround in addition to server caching and CDN support also provide their own website speed optimization plugin called SG optimizer. I will not get into technical details but to briefly explain this is a free plugin whose performance is equivalent to paid plugin WpRocket which is priced at $50 annually.
SG Optimizer will help to minify CSS, minify Javascript, fix blocks that slow down the rendering. It will also optimize image sizes, lazy load the content and other benefits that can make your news website load at lightning speed.
All these factors are absolutely critical for news websites to serve the visitors properly. Speed is a combination of both server speed and website. SiteGround can help you fix both of these with their ready to deploy solutions.
AMP News Website
Most of the traffic you will receive is going to be through mobile devices. If your website is optimized for desktop still there are some tweaks that you need to do in order to load the news website correctly. Accelerated mobile pages help to load the news website quickly to the visitor requests on mobile requests.
AMP pages can be tricky. If you have many plugins installed on the website to optimize the speed then all these plugins will be conflicting with one another. AMP pages break because of conflicts. These conflicts can turn your authority in search engines calculation down overnight.
SiteGround hosting provides one solution to optimize website performance factors. There will be no conflicts and AMP pages can be built in the required way.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Wrong foundations will lead to no results. SiteGround hosting packages are extremely economical for you to start out to host your next news website. The performance factors are benchmarks for a news website these days to be classified among the best.
So not it is not just the news content but how efficiently it is delivered to the user is also very important. This aspect is often overlooked when a website is chosen for hosting purposes.
