There have been many exchanges in the past on the topic of Google and SEO. Topics range from the best ways to build meta on each page, how to position header elements and how to create nice, static looking urls. One topic that is usually forgotten about, is server speed and the effect it can have on rankings and site traffic. However, investment in server memory can be one of the most beneficial spends you can make to increase traffic from search engines.
Back in the good old days, hosting options were usually influenced by price – virtual server space was a few hundred quid a year for maybe a couple of hundred megs, and that was it. Dedicated servers were out of reach of most pockets, usually costing around €3,000 or more a year for a basic, entry level linux.
Now though, times have changed.
Various hosting companies have cropped up offering a new product called ‘VPS’ hosting. VPS stands for ‘Virtual Private Server’, and it’s basically a happy medium between shared and dedicated hosting. VPS servers allow you the benefits of dedicated servers (root access, ability to change php.ini and my.cnf values), but at a much lower cost. For example, Blacknight Solutions are currently offering plans from €16 per month for 15GB of space, with RAM burstable to 512mb – plenty of memory and space for any small-medium size application.
But what happens when your site traffic grows? You quickly run out of memory, making your site slower, less engaging for visitors, and less appealing to search engine crawlers who have to spend more time at your site to get less information. Another benefit of VPS hosting now comes to the fore – flexibility.
In the past, too many times for my liking, i’ve had to get in touch with various hosting companies to upgrade memory in one of my dedicated servers, which can sometimes take plenty of time and money, as well as possibly considerable downtime. With VPS hosting you can upgrade by clicking a few buttons to allocate more memory to the server. Easy peasy.
So, down to the benefits. Well as I’ve mentioned before, I’m involved in plenty of projects with some hosted on dedicated servers, and my more personal ‘test’ projects on a Blacknight VPS hosting account. I’ve about 8 applications on my Blacknight VPS - some live, some in production and testing. Combined, they’re currently taking up about 30GB of space, including locally stored images, databases, and other stuff.
However, 30GB is what I started with (the Starter Plan), and about a month ago I upgraded to the 50GB Enterprise plan to handle extra storage requirements. But i’d also noticed response rates for visitors dwindle. One live application has about a million rows in its MYSQL database, and I had to get developers on the case to improve the efficiency of the database. But that didn’t help – I really needed more than half a GB of RAM to keep the application fast – with Blacknights’ Enterprise plan you get 2GB, and it shows.
Since the upgrade one of the applications in question has increased the number of pages indexed in Google to over 160,000, traffic has increased over 30%, and with that, site revenue has increased. The investment in extra memory has paid for itself several times over and, to illustrate this, here’s some nice graphs:
This is the graph which illustrates the number of KB transferred daily.
But here’s the time spent on the site to transfer that amount of data - it’s dropping! Is this a bad thing?
Clearly Not! Google loves the speed of the site – here’s the graph showing ‘pages crawled’ activity:
That’s it! Remember – an increased investment in hosting can pay itself off extremely quickly if you’re looking for extra traffic from organic search.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
what variables are most important here? Current server memory, current site traffic…any more detail for someone who didnt know google cared about your server spec!
Basically, VPS is great because you can not only manage server resources like memory in a way that you can’t with regular shared hosting plans, you can upgrade memory allocations etc quickly and easily.
So, if you have your site(s) hosted on a VPS, you can start with a small plan to handle initial traffic, but as time goes on you can easily upgrade your memory / space requirements at will – whilst still having the power to tweak your memory to work in the best way for you.
Google doesn’t want to have to try hard to crawl your sites, so the more memory the better – more site speed = Google happpiness.
I don’t believe that “burstable” RAM exists. What happens when another site on the same host server wants a bit of that 2GB you’ve both paid for?
I think it’s better to go for a virtual server that has a dedicated amount of RAM per client.
Virtouzzo allows hosting companies to oversell RAM and resources and if you’re paying for “enterprise” this should be part of the deal.
Regards
Gragame
@ Gragame,
Believe me, i’ve been through almost every host in the Irish market over the past few years, and plenty out of Ireland too (big rant about Fasthosts is on the cards sometime very soon), but I am actually seeing good results with Blacknight’s VPS.
Just looking at the performance of the VPS account and the sites on it for the level of usage i’m throwing at it, it is holding up very well – as the graphs above would suggest.
Example: three times weekly, one of the sites on the server runs an import from about 200 or so datafeeds, updating about 800k rows in a mysql database as it does, and adds about 10k new rows, as well as copying remote images to the server, and storing them.
Prior to this, the 200 or so datafeeds are grabbed from a remote server, and copied down.
I’ve never noticed any reduction in performance when all these things are going on AND site traffic is as busy as it is. In fact, it seems the more the site is used the site gets faster and faster (I have database caching turned on, and quite agressively too).
So, I really don’t think they’re overselling