There are some businesses for whom SEO is very important. If your business too demands good SEO, you should consider it on priority while selecting a host for your website.

One of the factors that can impact SEO of your site is shared hosting. Until a few years back, shared hosting was discouraged for sites where SEO was a priority. On a shared server, there may be cheap, unsuitable or offensive sites hosted such as porn or spam sites.

If your site is hosted on a server where such unsuitable sites are hosted, Google may penalize the server and that IP, and hence your site can also suffer. However, technically, it may not be always true. Web crawlers have grown smarter today and if your content is valid and acceptable, there should be no reason for Google to ignore your site.

And the current trends suggest that generally, many more sites are being hosted on a single server. So shared hosting may or may not affect your site’s ranking on Google.

Google crawler scans the site almost daily so ensure that your site is always online, 24X7. Ask your host to inform you in advance if some maintenance is scheduled and when site is expected to be down for some time. For such times, you can keep a backup server and make the site online so that Google does not miss it even for once.

If SEO is your highest priority, dedicated hosting is the best and safest option as your site is independently handled and managed on a single dedicated server.