Hi Tom,

Thank you very much for the fast reply and helpful answer!

I have also posted a couple CDN conversations on:
1. https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-effect-of-cloudflare-cdn-on-page-load-speeds-hosting-ip-location-and-the-ultimate-seo-effect
2. https://moz.com/community/q/what-happens-with-seo-when-a-site-is-served-via-cloudflare-cfn

If you feel like adding your thoughts there as well (entirely up to you) I would value them immensely.

Kind regards,
Mark

Hello,

I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal.

I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site).

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated!

Best regards,
Mark

Hi Richard,

Hey thank you very much for the fast and helpful reply!

To me it makes sense to host close to where your main customer base is, even with a CDN, even if there are posts which say that specifying the geo in Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools pretty much overrides the hosting location in terms of location context (or ... "mainly"):
https://moz.com/community/q/what-happens-with-seo-when-a-site-is-served-via-cloudflare-cfn

Given things are so hyper-competitive, to me it makes sense to incorporate every miniscule refinement where they all add up over time, in other words set up hosting closest to the customer base.

It seems that perhaps a VPS plan hosted in the US is probably the most sensible option at the moment, as I have sites that are specific to 7 countries but they use ccTLD ... and the rest of the 141 sites or so that I am running are for global targeting, but probably 40% of the traffic would come from US, 30% from Europe.   I guess I could create 2 VPS plans and host one in Europe but for now it seems perhaps not worth the effort and expense.

What are your thoughts on the article above?

Best regards,
Mark

Hello,

I would love it if anyone could advise whether to use VPS, shared or dedicated hosting to host 50 WordPress sites and around 50 other one page flat HTML sites ... with everything being served via CloudFlare.

Of course my main concerns are page load times, security etc.

I know it's a big question, but I would be very appreciative of the thoughts people have, and any recommendations.

Kind regards,
Mark