I’ve been researching this topic quiet a bit and I thought I would share what I have found. This list is meant to be fairly comprehensive of what the current discussion points are. This is not a “Live by these rules” list. If you wish to leave comments to debate these points, real world examples of your experiences would be great. Enjoy!
1. Hosting on a shared I.P. versus unique I.P.
On shared hosting plans, there could be hundreds of other sites getting their hosting on the same I.P. Let’s say one of these sites gets flagged as a spammer in Google system – after all, you never know when you are sharing I.P.’s with gambling, porn or pharmaceutical sites. Guess what? The I.P. now throws up a flag in Google’s system and your website is on the same one! This can have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings.
2. Hosting locally versus hosting anywhere in the world.
This one has two schools of thought. Some marketers believe that it doesn’t matter where you are hosted. There will be no adverse effect on search engine rankings. On the other hand there are those that believe, as Google focuses more and more on personalisation, where a website is hosted will be one of the factors it uses to determine relavancy to each individual searcher.
If you are optimizing a site to a local version of Google; such as UK, it is in some people’s opinions better to register the same country TLD, host the site with a company whose servers are based in the same country and get some quality backlinks from the same TLD sites.
3. Host using Linux Apache MySQL PHP versus windows hosting.
Linux hosting offers availability of free software, usage of htaccess and mod-rewrite and ease of community support. There is a general consensus on the web that windows hosting is much more restrictive and difficult for webmasters, especially bloggers, who are trying to get the most out of their websites on the search engines.
4. Buying Year-In-Advance Hosting or more versus auto renewal every few months.
From a search engine’s perspective, buying hosting for a 1 year commitment tells them that you are probably not a fly-by-night spammer. If you plan on trying to achieve authority status in your niche, you might as well pony up 5 years worth of hosting. That will surely send the message that you are here to stay and most sites are still kicking and screaming 5 years later anyways.
5. Get Mod-Rewrite / htaccess
Google is funny about duplicate content caused by accessing a domain by www. and the non-www. version of your site. Google Webmaster Account addresses this issue by selecting a preference of either www. or the non-www.
Or
6. Have your web host provide basic HTACCESS and MOD_REWRITE and write the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]
7. Make sure your site is hosted on a server with maximum uptime.
This one is a no-brainer. 
You don’t want search engine failing to crawl your site because it is down. They won’t be able to index your newly optimized pages that will cause you to rank higher in search results if your site is down.
Hope this was insightful.
4 Responses to “7 Debatable Reasons Hosting Influences SEO”
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They’re indeed debatable. Here are my quick response to them:
1. I think at the same time Google is aware of this issue, so why would they blacklist an IP.
2. Geographic area matters less but the response time.
3. With dedicated server, when you have to buy license for Windows, Linux or BSD certain are more cost effective.
4. Do search engines really know the difference?
5, 6. A WordPress or other platform dependent solution is available, but certainly server solution is more robust.
7. It is just one factor but also make sure the network the hosting is connected to is reliable. Host can be on, but not reachable.
This is all rather trivial beyond the mod-rewrite stuff.
To say that being on a spammy IP is bad is also something that is debatable. If you are one site about cooking on an IP full of porn sites, that is bad. However if the percentage of adult content is low, its really not that bad. The biggest worry with a shared IP/server is the liability of attacks. If somone else’s site gets hacked or attacked you are put at risk as well. It may just be a slow site, but could also mean downtime=>lost business.
Windows vs Apache is a tough one as well. There are blog platforms on both and both can do all of the same things at the end of the day, but apply to different programming languages and licensing structures. Sites with loads of custom server needs aren’t easily moved from server to server anyhow so its really just a descision that needs made. It should also be noted that worldwide free support of apache is easier to find than that for windows. I think server location is also less important than its made out to be. As long as you are in the right country and in a good datacenter with good response times, you will be fine.
Ouch I had an issue once where one of my sites was crawled while my host was down for a day and it sucked. Not only was the site down, but the double damage was done when googlbot came around to spider.
That probably set me back a few weeks.
#1 – you definately don’t want to host on the same IP (or even subnet) with domains that were heavily backlink spammed. It’s a question of risk here – if your site is valuable enough for you then it is best to move elsewhere, ideally on its own dedicated IP but it’s best to check that IP to be sure no junk was hosted there.
There are tools out there that show other domains hosted on same IP, however they won’t normally show them in order of backlink counts which makes it hard to see spammy neighbours (especially on subnets), our free tool however does this just fine, feel free to check it out: http://www.majesticseo.com/research/neighbourhood-checker.php
We actually used this tool ourselves to move away from one shared hosting, it’s not clear if that affected rankings however it’s best to stay away from bad neighbourhoods to give less reasons for search engines to raise red flags.