Hosting Options & SEO Performance

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. Today, we're going to be talking about different hosting options in SEO performance. And as always, I'm here with Michael. How are you doing today, Michael?

MICHAEL: I am doing very well. Thank you. I'm very excited to be talking about hosting.

ARTHUR: You seem a bit thrown off with me doing the intro.

MICHAEL: Look, I'm less thrown off than I was last time. I've experienced this before. It's a good experience. I think you've done well. Thank you. This might be your new role in the duo moving forward.

ARTHUR: I'll keep practicing. Well, you know what?

MICHAEL: You don't practice. You just freestyle, jump in and freestyle. Which is the way to do it, I reckon. Keep it natural. That's it. It's like giving a wedding speech. You don't want to be reading totally off the speech. You want to just, you know, flow and talk away.

ARTHUR: Do you remember me when I had to do a wedding speech for my best man speech?

MICHAEL: Yeah, you were rattled for about six months.

ARTHUR: So it's not the best advice at the moment.

MICHAEL: But look, you know what? I reckon you've drawn on that experience and you've done really well with that intro.

ARTHUR: So well done. Thank you for the feedback.

MICHAEL: No problem. Live feedback, live critique. But anyway, let's move on. Let's talk about hosting. It's going to be a short and sweet episode this week because really we're just going to look at three of our favorite hosting options that we use in the real world running SEO campaigns for clients. And I'm going to talk about the pros and cons for each platform as well as SEO considerations for them. And we'll start with the cheapest, most beginner option and then go through to the best option. So that's pretty much it, right? That's it, yeah. That is it. And you know what? I should give a little disclaimer. We're just going to be talking about our personal opinion using these hosts. Now, it's general advice. We're going to give pros and cons for each based on how we understand it or at least the way we've used these tools, these hosts. Things might have changed or things might change between now when we're talking about this and in the future. So we do recommend do your own research into each of them off this, but we're just going to be talking about, you know, our personal opinions. Yeah, so that's a big asterisk there. Don't sue us if you don't like what we have to say about your host. Don't sue us, period. Yeah, just don't. Okay, so let's get into it and chat about the first one, which is a cheap entry-level host. And this is really, You know, we're coming, this first host is coming from the angle of Australian businesses, you know, our Australian audiences. The next two hosts is going to be suitable for the world, but this one's really just suitable for Australia. And this host is Ventra IP. So Arthur, tell us a little bit more about Ventra IP, you know, why do we like to use and what are the pros for those guys?

ARTHUR: Venture IP. So I guess one of the pros to start off with is they have a whole wide range of hosting. So you can get hosting for as low as I think two or $3 per month. You can scale that all the way up to, you know, fully managed premium VPSs upwards of four or $500 a month. So they just have a broad range of different hosting. Um, it's a good host if you're starting out. So if you get like new to the whole SEO game, if you want to just quickly host a website and kind of familiarize yourself, it's a good, good place to start.

MICHAEL: It's nice and cheap. You know, you're looking for the lower end of that. It's about three to five bucks a month or so. Peanuts. You can't go wrong with that. They do like, they have standard like cPanel type hosting. And then they also have WordPress focused hosting if you want that. So, you know, depending on whether you're using WordPress or if you're using, you know, just a plain HTML site or something like that, you might use the different options.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I guess, I guess if you're a beginner, you know, cPanel might be a bit complex for you. So I guess there's that to consider as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah. The good thing, like if you're just doing WordPress, you can just use their WordPress focused hosting where it has like an installer to easily install WordPress. You don't ever need to go play around with databases or anything like that, setting up databases or trying to install WordPress manually. So. What a nightmare. For a beginner, it definitely is. But look, the other good thing about Venture IP is that you can also host your emails with them. So let's say you have your domain like mybrandnewbusiness.com.au and you want to have fred at mybrandnewbusiness.com.au as your email address, you can host all of that on Venture IP as part of the monthly fee. So it's just nice and simple for a beginner. They also do migrations, free migration. So if you happen to have a site already somewhere else, you can hit up their Australian based support and say, Hey, can you please migrate this site over for me? So I don't have to do it.

ARTHUR: And I really do that. I didn't know that even on the cheaper plants.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well for their WordPress hosting, definitely for the WordPress.

INTRO: Okay. That's good. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So that's all the good stuff. What are some of the cons for these guys?

ARTHUR: Um, look for me, I think one of the main cons would be their support. So every time I've had to deal with their support, it's very slow basically. So you create a ticket and it takes upwards of 12 hours for someone to get back to you. So you can imagine if you're having issues with your website, you want that addressed ASAP. Um, yeah. So that would be the main con I think.

MICHAEL: I would say with the support as well, not just the time, but it's sort of, it can be a bit generic or vague. Like you might say you've got a problem and they just fire something back that is very top line. Very scripted. Yeah. And it's not really helping you fix the problem or anything. You have to dig deeper. You have to go back and forth with them and have that extra delay in the messaging going back and forth. I've experienced that for sure. They do offer, I think, like premium support where you pay, it's like you're, you know, you fly with Jetstar or something, you have to pay for food or whatever. It's a bit like that. Yeah. You can pay a bit more and like you can prioritize your tickets and make them get answered a bit quicker, but. I guess it comes back to what we always say, you get what you pay for.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of these hosts used to do that with the SSLs and everything. Everything was an add on. If you wanted to access certain features, you had to pay an extra five, $6 a month. So that's, that's how they get you.

MICHAEL: Do they offer SSL? You get free SSL. We like it. There's so many cheap hosts out there, but Venture IP have a lot of features as part of their standard package. Like crazy domains, for example, with DNS, you want to do anything with DNS.

ARTHUR: Everything's an add-on.

MICHAEL: Whereas Venture IP is not. The support is not the best, but for five bucks a month, you can't expect that much. They're fast for Australia as well, but like if your site has traffic from overseas, not so fast, you know, it makes sense. Their servers are here in Australia. If someone's visiting your site from Lithuania for some reason, it's going to be slow. It's going to take time for them to get that data from the data center here in Australia. And on that note, they don't have a CDN, you know, like you would need to use a third party CDN and pay for that if you wanted to serve overseas traffic a bit quicker. And no staging as well, or at least, you know, I, I haven't really delved too much into their WordPress specific hosts and whether it has staging, but for, for the other hosting that I've used with them, there's not staging as part of it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Which I think is super important.

MICHAEL: Massively, massively. Does have backups, does have like good backups, but yeah, not the staging. Uh, so with all of that said pros and cons out of the way, what's the use case for venture IP? You know, who, who do we think should spend their money each month with venture IP?

ARTHUR: I think, look, anyone that's starting out, that is looking for a cheap host that's based in Australia. Um, yeah, for $5 a month, you can't go wrong. It's a good, good way to kind of test the waters. And you know, if you're happy with them, happy days, but if not, you can always move to a more premium host.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you're probably someone looking to keep costs down starting out. They don't have much traffic. Your traffic's in Australia. It's not really anywhere else. Simple.

ARTHUR: Just a simple basic host. Yep.

MICHAEL: So moving on, the next one that we have used and recommend in certain cases is a host called Cloudways. That's cloud and then W-A-Y-S, cloudways. This one, when it comes to cost, is all over the place. It could be anywhere from $12 to $200 USD per month, so whatever that converts out in Aussie dollars if you're in Australia. Realistically, you're looking at about $50 to $80 USD a month to use their platform. Now, the thing we like about Cloudways is It allows you to easily create servers on all sorts of different cloud hosting environments. So like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Linode, DigitalOcean, like all the big cloud hosts, which aren't always easy to use and set things up on. Cloudways is like a nice, I guess, interface that allows you to spin up servers on those platforms and then benefit from, you know, how fast they are and how easy it is to scale up and down RAM and CPU and that sort of stuff. And the control panel, the interface is pretty nice to use for Cloudways, right? Like it makes it relatively easy.

ARTHUR: Yeah, we used to host a lot of our clients on Cloudways back in the day and it was very easy to use. Yeah, the interface is great. You could just kind of flick through different applications, flick through different servers. It was just, yeah, super easy to use, super easy to scale up and down.

MICHAEL: Yep. They too have free migration. So, you know, if you, let's say you start out on Venture IP and then Your demands of your site mean you want something a bit faster, then you could have them migrate the site from Venture IP to CloudWaves easily. They also have automated backups. The good thing is they have staging as well. So you can work in your staging environment, test things out and then push it to the live environment without breaking your live site while you're testing things out on it. That pricing I spoke about before, how it's all, you know, it could be anywhere from 12 bucks to 80 bucks. It depends on whether you're choosing AWS or Linode or DigitalOcean or Google Cloud. They all have their own costs. So Cloudways obviously just charge you for that and then their own price on top of that. So look, you'd probably find going with something like Linode is probably the cheapest side of it and like Google Cloud maybe or AWS the more expensive end of it. So that's the pros. It's very fast. You set a WordPress site up on one of these servers and it is loading like mad. You can pick a data center really close to where your audience is and it is fast. It is fast.

ARTHUR: You know what I really like is that a lot of these hosts now offer free migrations. So they'll do that for you, which is huge.

MICHAEL: Yeah, no more backing up and trying to install the site on the new server and all the pain that goes with that or used to go with that.

ARTHUR: Yeah, a hundred percent. And every time I've used one of the migration services, it's always worked perfectly. Knock on wood, but yeah, they've been super helpful. Usually within 24 hours, they'll migrate the site of whatever server you're on onto their server. So yeah, that's massive.

MICHAEL: Absorbing that and the headaches that go with it rather than trying to do it yourself as a business owner. Oh, a hundred percent. But we did run into some cons when we use Cloudways in the past. Boy, did we. Yeah. So let's start, we'll start with all the, we'll go into our main one last, but the other cons that we found with it, like the sort of, I guess, simpler cons, email hosting is an add-on. So they, you on the servers can't set up email like you do on Venture IP easily from a dashboard. You need to add on, Rackspace hosting and then you need to update the DNS for your domain, the MX records to point to Rackspace and set up all the mailboxes there. It's a bit of a pain. Then of course you can use things like Google suite for your email, which we always recommend, you know, at a certain point, most businesses probably should be using that. So it's not necessarily a huge issue, but it is a con that email is not included. Support is a problem. We found in the past with cloud waves, similar to a venture IP in that it's very generic or vague. You know, you, you would have a problem and they would say, okay, we acknowledge your problem. Here's what it is. Even though you already know what it is, go figure it out. You sort of on your own. That was our experience with the support. It wasn't really that proactive and trying to help you.

ARTHUR: And it was a bit slow as well. I just wanted to get back on the email hosting. Do you think that there is any pros in having your emails hosted separately, other like away from G suite or Outlook Office 365? Just cost like with, cause I don't know. Sorry, go. Now I was going to say, I know with like G Suite, obviously you pay per email address so the cost can add up, but would that be the only reason why you would opt to do like a hosting like this for email?

MICHAEL: Pretty much from my perspective, yes. Okay. Because, you know, when you host your email on your server or something like this Rackspace add-on on CloudWave, you're ultimately responsible for troubleshooting everything to do with it, you know, it's just a pain, absolute pain.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's what I was going to say, because we have had issues with clients in the past that have had email problems whenever they had their emails hosted separately on a like venture IP or wherever else they hosted it.

MICHAEL: Not separately, like when you host it on your server, if your server goes down for whatever reason.

ARTHUR: I meant, sorry, away from G Suite. So if they had their emails hosted on a server. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Look, most businesses at a certain point, you should be able to afford to spend whatever it costs for your Google suite license. You know, I think it's like eight bucks a month or something per user, but you know, like at local digital, for example, we're spending 18 or 19, whatever it is, bucks per month per user. We've got well over 30 users in there. So it does that up. That's in us dollars as well. So you're looking at a grand a month for you, but it's not just email. Of course it's, you know, it's everything else and Google drive and all the rest of it. But, um, Yeah, we would recommend that or the Microsoft equivalent. Most of the time, we want nothing to do with email, really. But with Cloudways, if you're not using Google Suite or the Microsoft equivalent, it is a bit of a pain in the ass dealing with email. On the support, coming back to support, you can pay more, I'm pretty sure, with Cloudways for better support. But again, that just adds to your costs, you know, so, um, we have an option coming up that the support is just off the hook. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, um, you know, when you're dealing with, you want support, you want your support to be good because you run into a problem, like, you know, support is not important until you need it, you know, and it's like, it's like insurance. No, you might just get cheap insurance and then when you need it, it becomes a nightmare to deal with. Um, kind of the same with support off the top of my head, looking for an analogy there. Um, let's talk about our nightmare scenario that happened.

ARTHUR: Oh God. Do you remember what happened? Oh, I remember what happened. I remember what happened. So did you want to lead into it or?

MICHAEL: You can lead into it. You seem like you're in a bit of a role there, like you're in, like you're in training.

ARTHUR: Basically, well, a couple of years ago we were hosting a number of our client websites on Cloudways and everything was fine. You know, we had no issues until we started having issues. So I think what happened was there was a couple of plugins, WordPress plugins that, um, Basically, we're vulnerable and we're causing issues. Basically, there was attacks on the plugins and the server CPU was at 100% across all the applications. So our server was pretty much unusable because it was just basically at 100% CPU all the time. And that was causing all our clients' websites to crash. And we couldn't figure out what was happening. We were reaching out to support. They, like you said, they weren't very helpful. They were responsive, but they didn't really give us a solution to our problems. So for about a solid, you know, two, three weeks, we were just basically on our own trying to figure out what to do, how to fix this. Um, we figured out what the problem was and eventually, you know, resolved it. It was, yeah, I think highly due to a plugin, a WordPress plugin. Yeah. And, but you know, at that point we had clients complaining to us, you know, why is our website either super slow or not working? I had clients hitting me up on the weekends, on a Sunday, e-commerce clients who get a lot of their business on a Sunday complaining that their website was down, which is understandable. You know, it's, you know, you can't have that happen. Um, so basically we're just cornered. Felt like we were cornered because we had no support and we just, yeah, we needed to figure out what was happening.

MICHAEL: So I guess keep going, keep going.

ARTHUR: No, I was going to say, that's okay. Sorry. I was just going to say, that's basically what happened. Um, Yeah, all our client sites basically slowed down or crashed and we had zero to no support.

MICHAEL: Yeah, pretty much. We're on our own was the general message that support gave us. Maybe it's improved since then. You'd hope it has, but if you have multiple sites on a server and that happens and there's clients paying you for that, that's not a scenario you want.

ARTHUR: I guess that's a disclaimer there. The clients were paying us for our hosting services.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it was on us to fix. But when you have developers unable to get to the bottom of the problem quickly, it's just not a nice scenario. as a business, you know, we've moved away from hosting any clients just because it's not worth it. You know, we're a marketing agency. That's what we're good at. We had some legacy clients still on hosting from the early days. We moved away from that and migrated all of our WordPress clients off that server to this next host that we're going to talk about. Because we did a lot of research and tested some hosts and these ones sort of came out head and shoulders above the rest. So we have spoken about them before. What's their name, Arthur? Say their name. Kinsta. Kinsta.

ARTHUR: Kinsta.

MICHAEL: We love Kinsta.

ARTHUR: I actually do love Kinsta. It's probably one of my favorite companies.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And look, let's just hear a quick word from our sponsors. We'll be back in a minute. Kinsta hosting is the best. No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not, we have no relationship with them whatsoever other than being a customer. Yet. Well, yeah, I guess the more we bang on about them. Yeah, you never know. They might be listening. They won't need to sponsor us though, because we're doing it for free. But look, they're just awesome. And here's why. Cost, anywhere from $30 USD to $1,500 USD a month. But realistically, you're probably looking in that $60 to $80 range. Same as Cloudways.

ARTHUR: Yes, I think so. Yeah. So I think 30,000, sorry, 30 USD gets you 50,000 sessions per month.

MICHAEL: Right. Yeah. So their pricing's a bit different.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So they work, that's it. Yeah. So they work on visits to the site. So the pricing tiers are based on visits. I think the lowest tier for 30 USD is 50,000 visits. And then it kind of scales up all the way up to, you know, millions, millions of visits.

MICHAEL: And they also work on how many sites you run. So like on Cloudways, you spin up a server, let's say it's an AWS server, and then you can install applications on that server, which might be WordPress. And you can have tons of different sites or running off that one server. Whereas with Kinsta, they have like tiers for their, you know, 30 bucks a month, you might have one site with X amount of visits. The next level up, you might have three or five sites, something like that. And then more visits allowed across them all. It's important to note as well, Kinsta is WordPress only. They don't do anything else. So it's only suitable if you're on WordPress, which most business websites would be.

ARTHUR: Which is a pro and a con, I guess. A pro because they specialize in WordPress. A con if you're on a different CMS, you're going to have to find a different option.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Pro focus in WordPress con only for WordPress. Yeah. But look, the pros of that is it's just so finely tuned for WordPress, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Like one click staging is probably one of my favorite things. So you can just log in there and create a staging environment literally in a click. You can go in there and make whatever changes your heart desires and make sure you test it, make sure that it's working fine and then you can basically push it back to live in a click. It's that easy.

MICHAEL: The other thing they have like because it's WordPress focused, they keep an eye on the plugins you're installing and if you're installing like shitty plugins or plug-ins that have a known vulnerability, it will flag that and alert you and you can't run into scenarios like we did with Cloudways.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So that was, it was an open slabber. Exactly. So that would have saved us. So basically I think we even used Kinstar support when we were migrating clients over because they were the ones that figured out what the issues were. So that's how good their support was. They were the ones fixing our issues on Cloudways.

MICHAEL: We've migrated websites with the vulnerabilities and they cleaned it all up and fixed it as it came over. Yeah. Just so good. Let's talk about their support, because this is one of the reasons why we froth on Kidster so much. It's basically their support team. all over the world, so it's 24-7. You jump on the chat, it's not like a ticket, you just jump on chat, ping them, and they reply instantly. Yeah, there's someone there, always someone there. Always someone, and it's not just someone like level one, level two, level three, where they're following a template or something. The people you talk to are like WordPress gurus and hosting gurus all in one, and they can address, so far, any problem we have, they address, bang, there and then, without having to escalate it. Yeah. So that's what you want quick and instant support when things go wrong.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I find as well that they go above and beyond sometimes. So they'll help you or run you through certain things that yeah, they shouldn't, I guess. Yeah. That's outside of scope. So they'll give you instructions and spend time with you. I was chatting to support for about half an hour the other day where they were just giving me step-by-step instructions and how to set something up. So yeah. Amazing support.

MICHAEL: Yep. And they do daily backups with one click restore. So if something goes wrong, you can just roll it back to one of the previous versions of the site that they've got in their backups. They have like a hack cleanup guarantee, which is also cool, where if your website becomes compromised or hacked, you just contact support and they'll fix it for you. Did you know that?

ARTHUR: I did not know that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they do. They do. So that's another one of the reasons we went with them with WordPress. You know, you need to be keeping on top of back, um, updating plugins and all that. Sure. But because it's open source, things change quickly. Vulnerabilities can pop up quickly. There's so many automated like hacking tools out there that you can be compromised very quickly. So Kinsta, if that does happen, we'll just fix that for you. No additional cost.

ARTHUR: That's amazing. So they'll go in there, log in to WordPress and then sort it all out. Yep. Beautiful. Yep. It's like insurance.

MICHAEL: Pretty much. So, you know, like a lot of people will pay people for that when, when things go wrong with their site and you might be paying a few hundred bucks just to clean up a hack. It's all included as part of your, your monthly fee with these guys. So they're the main, you know, it's fast as well. Oh, it's very fast. We love fast. They have, um, Actually, it's not the only thing, I've got a couple of other things I've popped into my mind, but the speed, you know, it's on Google Cloud, so that's Google's own infrastructure that they run all of their stuff off, you can host your site on, data centers all over the place. They have a CDN, Kinsta themselves, so you can serve, you know, assets to overseas visitors from servers close to them very quick. They also have DNS, so you can point your name servers to use the Kinsta DNS, which is through Amazon. And it's fast, it means it's never going to go down and run into problems that happen with that. We used to run our DNS through a VPS server that we had set up. And if that server would sometimes get full because there'd be random sites backing up, and then the minute the server was full, all the DNS went down for all of the sites that were hosted on it. Whereas now, that will never happen. We're just using Kinsta's DNS. So that's awesome. They're at the moment migrating all of their sites to Cloudflare as well. So again, that's going to be good from a speed point of view, from a security point of view. I think they have firewalls, all sorts of stuff in security. Like being WordPress focused, they just have obsessively focused on all of the key areas that you need to consider when hosting a WordPress site. So for nerds like us, it's very exciting. It is very exciting. So use case for those guys.

ARTHUR: What about some cons? Do you have any cons?

MICHAEL: Well, we had that it's only for WordPress sites.

ARTHUR: I think pricing, I think just the pricing model can be a con because it can start to add up the more traffic you start getting to the site.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep. So I think we pay something like 60 US dollars a month, 70 US dollars a month at the moment for our site. So, you know, I guess it's not cheap, but considering all of those pros that we just gave before, it's worth it in my opinion. You get what you pay for. If you want quick support, if you want your site up all of the time, then it's worth shelling out $60 a month instead of $5. What else? Email, same deal as Cloudways that Kinsta doesn't have email hosting. So you would need to have your Google suite or something like that on top of it as well. And all the monthly fees that go with that. So there's that consideration, but you would, I would say most businesses would have that already.

ARTHUR: It's pretty perfect, isn't it? It is. Yeah, really. As far as has go.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so look, the use cases, businesses that have a WordPress site want fast hosting, want great support, have the traffic and the revenue as a business to justify spending that on hosting. And as well, if you don't know much about hosting and you're being sort of held hostage by a developer or an agency that might be charging heaps to do things, instead you can just host it on Kinsta and hit up their support and they're going to be able to handle a huge amount of the things that would pop up, you know, with your site. That is pretty much the three hosts that we use the bulk of the time. We'll push clients to Kinsta if we can, just because of all of the stuff we spoke about there. If you're starting out, go with Venture IP. Cloudways, look, if you're… It's a bit more hands-on. Yeah. And if you want to use cloud server infrastructure like AWS or Linode or DigitalOcean rather than Google Cloud, maybe you go there. If you have a bit of time to dedicate to managing it, you go there. If you're a little bit techie, you can go there. You might be able to get fast hosting cheaper than you would with Kinsta. But yeah, really they're the three that we would use in any given scenario.

ARTHUR: How do you feel after that? I feel good. I feel good. We knocked them all out. And look, like I said, Kinsta is probably the way to go for most businesses. If you have a WordPress website, then there's no reason why you shouldn't spend that a little extra, you know, $15 a month extra to get that support and get all those features.

MICHAEL: Yes, so this ad for Kinsta is done and dusted. We hope you enjoyed. Look, if you haven't come across these tools, if you haven't come across that one, check them out. It's probably going to make a difference if you do use ultimately Kinsta, but even Cloudways.

ARTHUR: We should put our affiliate link in the description. Yeah, we can read it out.

MICHAEL: Go to https://www.az7564kinsta.com slash whatever. No. I feel like links don't really work for podcasts, do they?

INTRO: No.

MICHAEL: We'll put them in the show notes if anyone wants to go there and click it. But look, that's the hosting episode done and dusted. If you want good SEO, use Kinsta. Don't bother with the others. And look, that's it. So thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with another exciting episode of the SEO Show. And until then, happy hosting optimization. See you later.

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