Two events this week that just made hosting business in Australia a bit tougher.
Australian dollar has just hit 93 cent USD today, and it is still on its way to parity (which I doubt will happen but I can be very wrong). Everything has already been more expensive in Australia than in US, and strong Aussie dollar + weak US dollar has just made the gap even wider.
Via Web Hosting Unleashed, HostGator has announced a new niche hosting service — SEO Hosting. From its hosting plan page:
Our hosting plans are designed for those who require advanced Search Engine Optimization tools. Our customers know that the key to a successful SEO campaign begins at the foundation, their web hosting provider. SEO hosting customers have come to depend on the reliable, easy to use interface that we have developed for unsurpassable Search Engine Optimization.
(Note: I was going to post this as a reply to Matt’s blog post, but his Typo kept on giving me “500 Application Error”. Well, I am now posting it here.)
Stuart Brown wrote about switching to a dedicated server after getting digged, and had experienced (1) much better page rendering time, and (2) more referrals from Google. Thus he concluded speculated:
Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering — could Google be using this data (site response time) to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?
Perhaps — perhaps not. I don’t think page response time is a major factor in ranking quite yet, but with the introduction of this feature in the Webmaster Console, perhaps sites that take a long time to load will see a slow decline in Google traffic?