As far as I know, the only effect your server is going to have on SEO is the hosting speed. That, and if you have shared hosting, that you don't have a bunch of spammy sites on your shared hosting.

The only difference that you're likely to encounter would be service related issues. Does Bluehost provide fast response? I don't know. I'm happy with Hostgator - but everyone's experience is going to be different.

My gut feeling - Go for it!

(You can always move back!)

Hostgator and Bluehost are owned by the same company EIG, you can se emore info here: Endurance International Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anywyas, having a slow server can impact your seo rankings, but it's also not good for your visitor experience, so it's best to get a good and fast server to host your site.

How is $10 per month expensive?

If you do your SEO right, small server speed differences won't hurt it, atleast what I can say with my experience.

Just do great job at optimizing your website. Minimize CSS, Javascript, use cache etc...

I have been using Namecheap hosting for over 3 years now, moved there since I got banned from Hostgator permanently (sent a bit more emails than allowed and got instantly banned, no warnings)...

If your planning to be in this business for long time, never pay your hosting monthly. You save alot money if you select one or two years hosting plan.

Reason why Hostgator is more expensive than others is its reputation.
They can use high prices because they still get new customers because of customer reviews.

If your running a real business that makes enough monthly income to pay your bills, you would be absolutely insane to have it hosted on shared hosting. Sites are vunerable enough (wordpress), to at least have your money making sites on a solid VPS.

You'll get more respect as a customer too, when you actually become one..(warnings etc..) Low end box = low end service.

Dreamhost and OVH come to mind as good providers.

Long answer short ~ YES ~ and then some!

Website speed has a huge effect on SEO for a not so obvious and non technical reason which I will come to in a minute.

But, yes, you do need to speed-up your website so search engines will reward you by sending more visitors than they send to your competitors. Also, conversion rates are far higher for websites that load faster than their slower competitors.

With that done you can concentrate on making money rather than how much your hosting is costing you. But just as a clue, my fastest VPS currently costs me less than $20 a month, so its not that expensive to go faster.

Anyway, the overriding reason why you need your website to be as fast as possible ~ Google avoids putting slow websites in their SERPs.

Why? Because most of their revenue is transaction based, and the more fast sites they present to users, the more money they (Google) makes. When they have a choice, the fastest site wins every time.

Its really that simple.

Terence.

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