Why Technical Debt and Hosting Matter

Back in 2014, while you were building your business, Google quietly started playing favorites. They literally created a system where:

Tier 1 sites get crawled daily (sometimes hourly)
Tier 2 sites get checked maybe weekly
Tier 3 sites? When Google feels like it

But here’s where it gets REALLY interesting…

Google uses DIFFERENT algorithms for each tier.

Let that sink in.

You’re not even playing the same game as the big guys. It’s like entering a baking contest where Martha Stewart gets a commercial kitchen and you get an Easy-Bake Oven.

I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners over the years, and here’s what kills me:

You’re pouring your heart into content, spending hours perfecting every article, dropping curated videos, yet somehow another site gets instant visibility while your website sits in Google’s waiting room.

Sound familiar?

Let me break down what’s really happening behind Google’s curtain.

Analogy Everyone Will Get

Now think about your website like a physical business location. Quality hosting is like having ample parking right out front. When customers (and Google) visit:

Premium Hosting = Valet service and a massive parking lot. Visitors pull up, instantly access your business, zero friction, pure bliss. You know exactly what I mean here, and you can thank the business owner for prioritizing and paying for YOUR experience.

For instance, we pay for LiteSpeed Enterprise, which means your not forced to pay for WordPress Rocket.

Decent Hosting = Street parking nearby. Takes a minute to find a spot, but it’s doable, but you have to pay or risk getting towed.

Routinely use Nginx (free), to reduce expenses and boost profit, while forcing you to buy WordPress Rocket, and this is just the start.

Cheap Hosting = Parking is six blocks away in a sketchy garage that’s sometimes full. Half your visitors give up and go somewhere else.

Siteground, Bluehost, Namecheap, Godaddy, where businesses go to die.

Scam Hosting = Parking, but your car gets stripped or stolen while your shopping. There are hosting companies that charge you $120/mo, while they pay $12/mo to Digital Ocean. Imaging thinking you have quality/premium hosting, but you’re getting a solution recommended for staging/development.

There are infinitely more of these, as greed thrives in all places.

Google notices EVERYTHING. How fast people can “park” (load your site). How safe the “neighborhood” feels (security). Whether the “parking garage” is even open (uptime). And beyond all of this, if the majority of users are happy.

Easy wins for any search engine, generative AI, and the most important, your audience WINS.

The Hidden Cost That’s Killing Small Businesses

And why a lot of independent website owners are crushed by updates.

During the DOJ antitrust trial (yes, Google’s in legal hot water), their Chief of Ranking admitted: “We do not run every algorithm for every document—cost matters.”

Translation: Google’s being cheap with YOUR website, or in other words, is it even worth the cost for Google to crawl, index, and rank your business.

They’re literally saying your business isn’t worth the computational cost of their best algorithms or the time required to crawl, index, and RANK you.

And I’m not even touching on technical debt, which plagues 9 out of 10 sites I audit. No matter what you do, or how much effort you invest in your business, brand, or content, if this is off, good luck.

impacted by Core Updates
stagnant growth, always stuck
slow and steady declines

Technical debt instantly drops you to the lowest TIER! And with millions of competitors, your instantly replaced.

Interestingly, business owners that partner with savvy technical providers, often do well online. And I do not mean the reactive partners, that you have to chase, but proactive partners that work for YOU.

While performance, security, and reliability, at the 99th percentile, open the flood gates for everyone, not just Google.

Quality Hosting Changes Everything

And no, our versions of quality hosting are NOT the same. As I suspect our version of site quality, content quality, and even the quality of your business and brand are NOT at the level required today (topic for another day).

We’ve migrated sites from everyone over the past 5+ years, and 99% of hosting companies are focused on monthly active users (MAU), revenue, and investors. It happened to Cloudways (bought by Digital Ocean), it happened to BigScoots (Stone-Goff Partners invested 20 million, at the worst possible time, pre HCU).

In contrast, whenever I do business, it’s not about the money. I build businesses and offer services that I know will change peoples lives.

Blogs – yes I’ve owned and sold numerous over the years, all built through this same vision, change peoples lives.
Audits – help owners identify, every possible website and business improvement, and learn to consistently stack good decisions.
Hosting – 99th percentile managed WordPress hosting, that owners use to build multi-million dollar businesses.

Real businesses, consistently put users first, and if you look, it’s easy to see, and it’s often obvious.

Remember when I mentioned that Google treats websites differently based on tiers? Well, here’s what most owners don’t realize:

Google measures EVERYTHING about your site:

How fast it loads (milliseconds matter)
How stable your server is
How secure your connection is
How reliably they can crawl your content
How fast your website loads for users
How quickly a user engages with your website
and the list goes on, and it’s NOT just Google

People that visit your business are ten times worse. In fact, impressing bots easy in comparison, as it’s easy to quantify.

Setting up shop in a building with no parking. Your business, brand and content might be amazing, but if people can’t easily get there, they’ll go somewhere else.

Poor hosting sabotages everything else you’re doing right. Google notices these technical failures instantly, just like customers struggling to find parking.

Core updates can be amazing if your on the right side, and consistently make it easy for Google to crawl, index, and rank your business.

On the other end, technical debt, and poor hosting, make it difficult, landing you in the lowest tier, which often results in frustration over growth, or worse declines.

We’ve even seen this play out, regardless of updates! I wrote this hosting case study about a site that did the opposite and moved from 99th percentile to 20th percentile hosting, to save $100/mo, while subsequently losing 10s of thousands a month in revenue. The decisions owners make MATTER!

Safe to say, this company was paying $300/mo for private parking, directly in front of their business. Then one day decided to downgrade to street parking, and within a week their business imploded.

Back to technical debt and managed WordPress hosting. The owner above went from zero technical debt, and 99th percentile hosting, to the complete opposite. And if you think that decisions like this aren’t serious red-flags, I imagine you’re a very frustrated business owner.

This was such a rampant problem, I started Crave Hosting, five years ago. And within the first year, we were already operating at a level unheard of in the industry.

We have clients paying $300/mo, with millions of pageviews, we haven’t heard from in 4+ years, zero tickets.

Imagine, zero technical debt, 99th percentile performance, security and reliability, and all you have to do is focus on business and growth.

As far as I’m aware, services like this do not exist. So when I said, “And no, our versions of quality hosting are NOT the same.”, you know what I mean.

The Real-World Impact Nobody Talks About

Here’s what quality hosting actually does (in plain English):

1. Speed = Trust When your site loads instantly, Google thinks “This is a serious business that prioritizes their audience”. But more than that, it’s effectively EASY and cost-efficient for Google and other search engines or AI, to crawl (interact) with your business.

This is exactly why owners complain about de-indexing or the inability to get indexed. In short the cost to crawl, index and rank content is not worth the result.

Which ends with de-prioritizing the site and prioritizing a competitor. After all, we’re playing a zero sum game, when you lose, another wins.

2. Uptime = Reliability Every time Google visits and your site’s down, you lose trust points. It’s like being closed when customers show up or worse, you’re out of their favorite dish. Do it enough times, they stop coming, and shift their attention to a competitor that’s open for business.

3. Security = Authority SSL certificates, firewalls, security headers, these aren’t just tech mumbo jumbo. They’re Google’s way of asking “Can I trust you with my users?”

And because we prioritize this, we’re paying Cloudflare Enterprise tens of thousands of dollars per month to leverage their security infrastructure, for clients, by default.

What Actually Works (No BS)

Start stacking quality decisions! If you’re business is declining there is no better time to take action. Equally, if your business is doing well, and growing, avoid making necessary changes and focus on operations and growth.

Immediate Actions:

Move to quality hosting (quick and easy win)
Focus on YOUR audience, not Google’s robots (re-evaluate)
Create content that makes people WANT to come back (advocate)
Stop copying what “seems to work” for others (it’ll never work for you)

The Results I See Daily: When owners make this ONE hosting change, I consistently see:

Crawling improves, which naturally improves
Indexing, which naturally improves
Rankings, which naturally improves
Revenue.

You’ll find I frequently say, “Internal out vs External in”

We’re not optimizing for a single traffic channel, we’re optimizing business for all traffic channels. Every improvement you make as an owner internally, reflects externally.

If that’s not clear enough, how about this:

When you serve users exceptional coffee, you’ll resonate everywhere, regardless of the platform, and your business will grow.

When you serve users shit coffee, it doesn’t matter how much time and effort you invest, even if you manage to convince users to visit, they’ll never come back.

The Bottom Line

You’re not competing on a level playing field. Google’s Indexing Tiers mean some businesses get the red carpet while others get sidelined.

But here’s the good news: You can influence which tier Google puts you in.

Quality hosting eliminates technical debt and significantly improves cost-of-retrieval for every machine, including Google.

The difference is often night and day, which is often enough to trigger instantaneous boost in crawling, which cascades to indexing, ranking and ultimately users.

Your content deserves to be seen. Your business deserves to grow. And you deserve to compete with the same algorithmic advantages the big guys get.

This is why Crave is priced by pageviews! We offer the same 99th percentile performance to business owners with 50k pageviews ($35/mo) as large sites with 3m pageviews ($450/mo), leveling the playing field.

Beyond hosting, we even integrate WordPress Management (Core, Theme and Plugins), and take care of everything imaginable in our VIP plan. Which eliminates cross-talk between hosting company and WordPress management company.

If you run a real business and prioritize users, we’d love to help you level up!

Let’s talk

Your move: Audit your current hosting. If it’s not built for business, you’re losing money every day. And in this economy? That’s a luxury none of us can afford.

P.S. – If you’re still on bulk-hosting or paying less than $35/month, you’re not even in the game. You’re watching from the sidelines, forever.