There’s one particular UK webhost that’s investing heavily in advertising right now, with a campaign claiming that server speed directly impacts your website’s effectiveness in Google, to the extent that Google actually penalises slow loading websites.

Personally, I’m not 100% convinced, and even if Google does pay attention to speed of the server (load speed of the page is another matter) then I’m sure it’s significance is minor compared to many other things I’d consider first if my SEO needed improving.

That said…  a fast loading website (helped by a fast server) is clearly an important thing – moreso for users looking to minimise the time they spend hunting down info or browsing for products/services to buy online. 

At NSDesign, we had a hunch that our servers were among the fatest in the UK, especially since we’re what you might call a “budget host” (at £25 for a standard shared linux host – we’re certainly in the “budget” price range), so we did a little research…

Independant “performance benchmarking” site www.webperf.net lists 170 UK Webhosts, and regularly tests their performance (measuring the Mean Rate in K/Sec – ie: the speed!).  We’re currently at a respectable position 16, well ahead of many of the major Hosting “giants” (the ones you see advertising full page in .NET magazine).  A quick check of the 15 hosts above us, and it’s no surprise that on average, most of these companies charge considerably more than us, with a few just specialising in providing high-end dedicated servers (no end-user hosting at all).

Something to proud of for certain, but how do we compare to the uk host that’s claiming to be so fast that even google prefers them?  Well – unfortunately they don’t list themselves in Webperf, so we resorted to a quick a simple speed test of their own website homepage using www.alertra.com and also did the exact same on the NSDesign.co.uk homepage.

Once we’ve removed the duplicate test locations, the above results show that on average (across the globe), we’re over 60% faster, and when tested in the UK (the London test), our access was over 40% quicker.  FORTY PERCENT quicker than (if we believe the hype) one of the UK’s fastest hosting companies.  Not bad for a little webhost from Glasgow.  Maybe helps explain why our own Google Search listings are so highly placed….  page1, position1 for keywords such as “Web Hosting Glasgow”, and “Linux Hosting Scotland”.  Server speed, or just damn fine SEO?  You can decide, but no matter the conclusion, well done us

Catch-all email may sound like a great way to setup your email – but in practice, it’s almost guaranteed to give you problems.

At first glance – the ability to setup your email to allow everything@yourdomain.com to be received to your inbox sounds great – especially if you’re trying to promote yourself as being bigger than you actually are.  Once setup, you can simply promote sales@ info@ support@ anythingyoulike@ addresses, all handled in exactly the same way by your default email account.

The main problem with catch-all email is spam.  Unfortunately Spam Email isn’t going away – it’s continually on the rise, and the methods spammers use get more elaborate and harder to tackle.  By allowing email to anything@yourdomain, you are inviting a spammer to bombard you with email.  Dictionary attacks (whereby the spammer sends 1000′s of email to randomwords@yourdomain) are common, and with a catch-all email setup – each of spam these emails will be delivered to you. 

The end result is not only a LOT of unnecessary spam email to go through and delete from your inbox, but the potential for your web hosting account to run out of available web-space.  Emails take up space, and it doesn’t take too many spam emails (especially if the mailbox you’re directing them to isn’t regularly checked) to consume 100′s of MB.  Far too often we see “help I’ve run out of webspace” support tickets, caused simply by spam email to a default (catch-all) email account.

The other common occurrence that we see is regarding Spoofed emails.  Again, sad but true – it’s common to have your domain name spoofed by a spammer.  Email spoofingis the practice of changing your name in email so that it looks like the email came from somewhere or someone else.  This isn’t too much of an issue itself (technically, the emails are NOT sent by you, or through your account – and this is easily proved by examining the email headers), but if a spammer sends out a few thousand emails using a from address of random@yourdomain – you can guarantee that most of these emails will bounce – right back to you – because your catch-all accepts email to random@. 

So..  take the time to setup one or more email addresses that you actually use, and make sure you disable catch-all email – otherwise, sit back and enjoy the spam.