Cloud versus regular hosting

Which is better for SEO? my website it is currently on shared hosting. I was a bit concerned about possible bad c-blocks and was also looking for ways to speed it up. The cloud hosting claims to be 2-4x faster. (it would be with the same company, hostgator)

I can switch it over to business cloud with private SSL & IP. What is the best practice for this, and is it harmful from an SEO perspective?

I really doubt that Google dooms entire C blocks of IPs. Maybe in the past it was used to detect bad neighborhoods and PBNs, but now they have the means to do it properly by analyzing linking patterns.

Hostgator is horrible these days compared to what it was. I'm not surprised you're having speed issues on their shared hosting. Once they were bought by EIG they started overselling the servers like they do with every other company they own.

Moving to a faster server with an SSL certificate and private IP is not in any way, shape, or form bad for SEO. Faster & Secure are fantastically good. Private IP doesn't matter at all.

I'm not sure about the Cloud Hosting Meme. Hosting has always been cloud based. I'm not sure what they're getting at there other than being able to quickly dial up and dial back resources like adding droplets or whatever.

I use a VPS. It's like having a dedicated server, except you just have a portion of resources of one server dedicated to your account. Nobody else can encroach on those resources, unlike on shared hosting. You might look into that.

I'd heavily suggest getting away from the Walmart and Targets of hosting like Hostgator and GoDaddy and move into something like Knownhost, Liquid Web, etc.

@Future State, thank you excellent advice. Originally got a re-seller accounts with them 10 years ago when I had 500 websites because of how good their live chat and customer service was. Going to check out knownhost, liquid web now.

They have really fallen off, even in their cpanel there are broken links. Unreal.

So switching servers should have little to no effect in the serps?

luxer said:

So switching servers should have little to no effect in the serps?

Click to expand...

If you make sure your site is live on the new server and works correctly, then the final step will be to change the nameservers of your domain at the registrar. That's what'll point the internet traffic to the new server and IP Address.

Technically there should be zero down time. All Googlebot will find is a new IP address but the site is the same and performs much faster. If anything you should see improvements due to the increased speed, likely in the long-tails more than anything else. You'll probably pick up more long-tails too.

If you decide you like Knownhost (that's who I use and who BuSo is hosted with), make sure you use our affiliate link and custom coupon we got with them:

• http://www.buildersociety.com/go/knownhost
• BUSO15 (for VPS-2 and above)

If you use them together, you can get 15% off of the lifetime of your usage, every month. We also have BUSOSSD (for SSD-2 and above) if you want a solid state drive. Take note it only works for VPS-2 or SSD-2 or above. Not VPS-1 / SSD-1.

But yeah, if you do a seamless migration there should be zero down time so there will be zero losses. This is something I've done at least 100 times, zero issues ever. Just keep both servers live with your site until the nameservers have propagated across all of the various nodes around the globe (takes 48 hours max, usually happens in 30 minutes or less).