Oh-oh. There’s a new snake-oil in town and it’s name is ‘hosting speed’. It’s not new of course, the speed of your website has been an issue for years but now that Matt Cutts has mentioned it in his blog, all the hosting salesmen in the world are lining up to sell you the fastest hosting ever “because it will increase your rankings”.

Utter nonsense.

Now before I get the obvious rants about this, let me just qualify my stance here. Web speed is important, it’s very important because what everyone wants and should have is a fast user experience. Waiting for ages for a website to load is a complete no-no and should be discouraged at every turn and we’ve gone some way to fixing this with reducing reliance on Flash (although some people still have entirely Flash websites)  and shrinking down the images we use on the web in general.

However, there’s a lot more to it than that and shoddy programming can mean your site is still slow to download which can be detrimental to the user-experience and that should strike fear into the hearts of all dedicated web-heads. Google’s mantra to improve user-experience means they have now decided that website speed will become a factor in your search engine rankings. This is sensible because if a site is number one for a particular keyword but it takes ages to view it – I’m going to get a bit annoyed and go somewhere else.

But does this mean I need the fastest hosting money can buy?

Absolutely not. Fast hosting is obviously important but all this really means is that you should be careful of heavily-overused shared hosting that gives noticeable delays in page load and if you’re paying more that about ten pounds per month, you’ve probably already got this. The days of super-slow hosting are thankfully gone and even the cheapest accounts can give decent quality and speed. I have one shared account costing about 6 pounds a month and it is consistently fast and reliable.

But some hosting companies are showing graphs of their hosting against others, displaying a difference of sometimes 20 milliseconds and stating that this can improve your search engine rankings. This just can’t possibly be true as it would mean the only people who have a chance in the rankings must use the most expensive hosting (some hosting can cost £600+ per month!). Such a stance by Google would be ridiculous and unworkable. Their business is built around the fact anybody can have a website and anyone can make money from the web, an elitist stance like this would destroy their credibility.

No, some web hosting companies are playing on fear. Everyone wants to be top ten so lets try to convince them that they need to spend a fortune to get there – not a good stance. If you get a phone call from a company pushing this bear in mind that they want you to buy their services and that’s the whole reason for the call – they’re not doing it for your benefit!