Probably 40% of the clients we see require a change of hosting company (or hosting plan). Search engine optimization is not about title tags and keyword frequency anymore. In fact, those 2 mean less than ever in a successful SEO campaign. So what are the requirements of good SEO Hosting? Here are a handful of features we look for in recommending a host to our clients…
1. USE Linux Apache MySQL PHP
For a large number of reasons (availability of free software, usage of htaccess and mod-rewrite, ease of community support, etc), don’t get Windows hosting. You can argue about this with me later, but you will be wrong. And people will laugh at you.
2. GET Unique IP(s)
While there is limited evidence regarding the matter, it is generally a good idea to go ahead and secure your own IP address. Some shared hosting companies do not allow you to do this, so make sure before signing up. The last thing you want is a ton of porn, gambling, and banned made-for-adsense (MFA) sites sharing IPs with you. This is part of the “Bad Neighborhood” concept you may have heard of at one point or another. Your best bet, get your own IP and stop worrying about your neighbors.
3. BUY Year-In-Advance Hosting
This one frustrates the hell out of most folks. Buy your hosting from companies that require 1 year in advance! Simply put, black-hat-SEOs, phishers, and spammers are not interested in purchasing a years worth of hosting for a domain they expect to last only a few weeks. Find a hosting company that requires at least 1 year commitment. If the service is truly terrible, you can always do a chargeback. Don’t buy from a host that offers both – that does you no good either. Only buy from hosts that require a contract! You can afford to pony up the $25-$100 bucks to get a years worth of shared hosting.
4. USE Call-To-Verify Hosts
A growing method to stifle credit card fraud is the usage of phone-verification systems. Yeah, it is annoying as hell. Many hosts do this automatically with text-message type systems, but I recommend the old-fashioned human-to-human phone call. A spammer creating 100 hosting accounts a week (or a day) is not going to be able to answer that many phone calls. And a phisher paying for hosting accounts with a stolen credit card will steer clear of these sites. It is worth the hassle.
5. DEMAND Mod-Rewrite / htaccess
In one of the most frustrating examples of a bug-not-fixed, Google has yet to offer a truly effective system for preventing duplicate content caused by accessing a domain by www. and non-www. version of your site. (Google offers a method by creating a Google Webmaster Account and providing a preferred domain. Why not just fix the bug, Google?!?)
Thus, in order to clean up Google’s mess, it is essential that your SEO web host provide basic HTACCESS and MOD_REWRITE so that you can do this…
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.thegooglecache\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thegooglecache.com/$1 [R=301]
Of course, replace the domain in the code with your domain. Otherwise, you will be sending me a lot of traffic 
. There are tons of other uses for mod rewrite which we do not have time to cover here. There is a windows alternative known as ISAPI Rewrite, but it is rarely available on shared windows hosts.
6. ENSURE UpTime
While Google is doing a much better job recognizing small outages, losing your site for hours or even days can have more impact than just rankings. You no longer need to just trust the advertising, use WebHostingStuff to find actual Up-Time data for particular hosts.