Can your web hosting company affect the success of your search engine optimization campaign? You betcha. Fast page load times, a static ip address, and 100% uptime can all affect the performance of your website in the search engines, and not all web hosts are created equal. However, that doesn't mean you need to sign up with a web hosting company that claims to know something about SEO, nor do you need to pay an arm and a leg. All you need to do is verify the following:

• Is the web hosting company reputable? (the best way to know is to get a recommendation from someone you trust)
• Does the web hosting company give you a static ip address? (so that you know you're not sharing an ip address with a shady website unbeknownst to you)
• Does the web hosting company have stats about their uptime?
• Do websites hosted with the company load quickly? (it's hard to really gauge this until you have already signed up)

A quality web hosting company will provide good answers to all of these, and you should be able to get a good hosting account for well under $10 per month. For a list of the web hosting companies we recommend, visit our web hosting page.