Hosting affects search results mainly through the website's response speed and availability. Shared hosting, where many websites run on one server, shows up as slower response times during peak periods and, when traffic spikes, as outages as well. The decisive parameters when choosing are server response time, guaranteed uptime, available computing resources, support for current technology versions, and the speed of support when a problem occurs. The server's geographic location plays a smaller role for locally focused websites than is often claimed, because it can be compensated for with a content delivery network. Stability matters more: repeated outages lead to the crawler visiting the site less often, and during downtime the company loses both orders and visitors' trust.
See also: Server response time, Uptime monitoring, CDN and content distribution.
