Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Using a third party server to host site elements

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Using a third party server to host site elements

    Technical SEO
    6
    7
    4285
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • zealmedia
      zealmedia last edited by

      Hi guys -

      I have a client who are recently experiencing a great deal of more traffic to their site. As a result, their web development agency have given them a server upgrade to cope with the new demand.

      One thing they have also done is put all website scripts, CSS files, images, downloadable content (such as PDFs) - onto a 3rd party server (Amazon S3). Apparently this was done so that my clients server just handles the page requests now - and all other elements are then grabbed from the Amazon s3 server. So basically, this means any HTML content and web pages are still hosted through my clients domain - but all other content is accessible through an Amazon s3 server URL.

      I'm wondering what SEO implications this will have for my clients domain? While all pages and HTML content is still accessible thorugh their domain name, each page is of course now making many server calls to the Amazon s3 server through external URLs (s3.amazonaws.com).

      I imagine this will mean any elements sitting on the Amazon S3 server can no longer contribute value to the clients SEO profile - because that actual content is not physically part of their domain anymore. However what I am more concerned about is whether all of these external server calls are going to have a negative effect on the web pages value overall. Should I be advising my client to ensure all site elements are hosted on their own server, and therefore all elements are accessible through their domain?

      Hope this makes sense (I'm not the best at explaining things!)

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • loopyal
        loopyal last edited by

        Hello Zeal Digital,

        I use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for images, CSS and javascript.

        Doing that adds only about $10 to cost per month for a site that had around 800,000 pageviews per month.

        You have complete control over the images. If there is a problem, you can force the CDN to flush a file and reload it from the source. You add code to your .htaccess file that tells the CDN how long to store images before fluching them and getting a new copy. It is all automated, there is generally no work for you to do. I host with softlayer.com and this is part of their service.

        The change from self-sourced images, css and scripts had a massive improvement on the server.

        • it is a 16-processor linux box with twin 15,000rpm SCSI drives and 12Gb RAM - it is quite fast!

        Page delivery times improved by 1-2 seconds.

        The server now is so lightly loaded that it could be downgraded to save more money.

        It has zero effect on SEO. The CDN is accessed using a CNAME.

        -   static.domain.com  - so don't worry about it looking like components are from other places.

        The CDN has servers all over the world, so no matter where the visitors are, it is only a few hops for them to get most of the content, making it much faster for someone in Australia who would normally pull images from a server in the USA.

        Your only problem with Amazon S3 is that they have crashed it a few times, but other than that, it is a good thing to do.

        I wouldn't advise them to self-host, unless you want to increase their costs, server loading and page delivery times.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • zealmedia
          zealmedia @jeff-rackaid.com last edited by

          Great advice, cheers Jeffery!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • jeff-rackaid.com
            jeff-rackaid.com last edited by

            I work with a number of high traffic sites (TB's of data each day, 10's millions page views/month).  With many of these sites, we have offloaded static content to either dedicated static content servers (typically cloud based so we can scale up and down) or to content deliver networks.  I've not had anyone report any SEO impact.

            In contrast, they often see user engagement (page views/user), repeat visitors, and other traffic metrics improve.  Users like fast sites.  Also, Google apparently likes fast sites too, so while I've not seen it, you could actually get a boost in your SERPs due to faster loading pages.

            If you break down a modern web page, you will find numerous elements required. Dozens of images, CSS, javascript as well as the page itself.  All of these items require a request to the web server.

            With some graphic intensive sites, I've seen as much as 95% of all web server requests (HTTP requests) be attributable to static content.  By moving these HTTP requests to other systems, you free your primary server to handle the application.  This provides a better user experience and improves scalability.

            Content Delivery Networks

            I do not use Amazon's Web Services so I do not know specifically what they offer.  But here are two CDN's Ihave used with good success:

            Internap:

            http://www.internap.com/cdn-services-content-delivery-network/

            Edgecast:

            http://www.edgecast.com/

            One method I look for is called "origin pull." With this method, you do not have to upload files to the CDN. The CDN will fetch them automatically from your site as needed.  I found this is much easier to manage on sites that have frequent content updates.

            zealmedia 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Dan-Petrovic
              Dan-Petrovic last edited by

              Hosting images externally never had any impact on cases I had a chance to observe. The only problem I can think of is that you lose control over loading times or if somebody takes an image and links (credits) the image hosting domain instead of your domain.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Highland
                Highland last edited by

                Couple of notes for you

                1. There isn't any SEO impact on WHERE the data is loaded from. Look at any major website (especially one that ranks well) and they're openly using content delivery (like Akamai, Amazon S3/Cloudfront, etc) for static content. This is good business practice because it takes that load off your web server and often places the content closer to where the client is. Faster content delivery can help SEO if you have a slow server.
                2. If they're using the raw S3 buckets I would HIGHLY suggest signing up for Cloudfront. There's two benefits to doing this. First, you put the content into Amazon's cloud, where it is more readily available. Second, you can use domain aliasing to help obscure the source. For instance, let's say you have an images bucket. You could add a CNAME DNS record for images.yourdomain.com and then put that into your source code. You can still see where the DNS takes you, but it's not obvious to the general public. The cost difference between raw S3 delivery and Cloudfront is negligible.

                Oh, and I use Amazon Cloudfront for my delivery. Never had any SEO issues with doing so.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • oneticsoft
                  oneticsoft last edited by

                  I don't recomend to have the resources and database to other server than files, it makes some flood traffic between servers, the resources are harder to load and the site optimum speed is decreased. Also you can't compress this content so they are downloaded independently.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  Browse Questions

                  Explore more categories

                  • Moz Tools

                    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                  • SEO Tactics

                    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                  • Community

                    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                  • Digital Marketing

                    Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                  • Research & Trends

                    Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                  • Support

                    Connect on product support and feature requests.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • Breemcc

                    Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?

                    magento nginx

                    Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?

                    Technical SEO | | Breemcc
                    0
                  • Keith-007

                    Using GeoDNS across 3 server locations

                    Hi, I have multiple servers across UK and USA. I have a web site that serves both areas and was looking at cloning my sites and using GeoDNS to route visitors to the closest server to improve speed and experience So UK visitors would connect to UK dedicated server, North America - New York server and so on Is this a good way or would this effect SEO negatively. Cheers Keith

                    Technical SEO | | Keith-007
                    1
                  • tiromedia

                    Should we use Cloudflare

                    Hi all, we want to speed up our website (hosted in Wordpress, traffic around 450,000 page views monthly), we use lots of images. And we're wondering about setting up on Cloudflare, however after searching a bit in Google I have seen some people say the change in IP, or possible sharing of Its with bad neighbourhoods, can really hit search rankings. So, I was wondering what the latest thinking is on this subject, would the increased speed and local server locations be a boost for SEO, moreso than a potential loss of rankings for changing IP? Thanks!

                    Technical SEO | | tiromedia
                    1
                  • bjalc2011

                    Hosting images externally

                    In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site? Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc. Thanks

                    Technical SEO | | bjalc2011
                    0
                  • thinkcreativegroup

                    Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?

                    We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!

                    Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup
                    1
                  • tutarmi

                    Seo For Forum Sites

                    I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?

                    Technical SEO | | tutarmi
                    0
                  • design_man

                    Hosting sitemap on another server

                    I was looking into XML sitemap generators and one that seems to be recommended quite a bit on the forums is the xml-sitemaps.com They have a few versions though. I'll need more than 500 pages indexed, so it is just a case of whether I go for their paid for version and install on our server or go for their pro-sitemaps.com offering. For the pro-sitemaps.com they say: "We host your sitemap files on our server and ping search engines automatically" My question is will this be less effective than my installing it on our server from an SEO perspective because it is no longer on our root domain?

                    Technical SEO | | design_man
                    0
                  • askotzko

                    Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

                    I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.

                    Technical SEO | | askotzko
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.