Hosting is one of the keystones to your chances of success online if your business relies on your websites or blogs and you have more than one or two of them. Let’s be honest here, while you can make some money from just one or two sites, why stop there? The current mode of thought with regards to making money online from organic traffic driven to websites or blogs is that the more you have, the more chances you have to increase your income. Its a numbers game and the bigger the numbers the better the chances!
So when you get your head around the fact that owning a lot of cyber real estate is the sensible way to go in this business, your thoughts will have to turn to hosting, because you are going to need some heavy duty hosting to make sure all your sites stay up and visible, not only to visitors but to the all important search engine bots that will come calling at any time of the day and night and if your hosting company is down even fro a few seconds, they could be the vital seconds that Google’s bot tried to access your site and couldn’t. Guess what will happen if this occurs more often than just once? You could actually lose ranking in the SERPs because yoru site is perceived as down!
So choosing a good hosting company for all of your sites is paramount to ensuring your business stays afloat because your websites stay up. The smart money goes a little further by relying not only on one hosting company, but two or more. This is to spread out your sites across different servers. it also has the nice added bonus of providing your sites with different class C IP addresses. This is an important consideration for SEO where some of your sites will naturally link to each other. You get more link juice from sites linking to you that live on a different class C IP address to your main site.
But that’s not really why I’m writing this post.
The main purpose of this post is to hammer home the importance of choosing a reliable hosting company (or several) so that your sites are not liable to outages for whatever reason and you are not going to run into support problems when problem occur that need fixing fast. Also, if you host several sites in one place, it is far better to pay a little more and get a reseller package rather than a basic shared hosting package. A reseller is more robust and you get to put each domain in its own separate account, so that if one site suddenly starts getting a ton of traffic, you can adjust its bandwidth allocation yourself before it hits its limit and goes down.
If you had that happen on a shared hosting account, one site hitting the bandwidth limitation will take down all the sites on there along with it. This will not happen with a reseller. Plus more authority is given to reseller accounts on any one server. That means that if there are bandwidth problems to a server, then the shared accounts will be taken down by the hosting company before the resellers. That in itself is worth knowing and worth the extra cash to ensure peace of mind for your sites.
There are some hosting companies that I use personally and have found them to be robust and reliable. The main one is of course Hostgator (see the banner ad in the right column) and there I have a reseller account for a large group of sites. Another reseller package I have is with SEO Hosting, which is a spin off of Hostgator. They provide me with the same level of service and support as Hostgator plus a selection of different IP addresses for my sites.
There is another hosting comapny that is starting to get some good reviews from other marketers, although I can’t personally vouch for it as I’m not using it yet. That may change very soon, but for now, if you want a good writeup on HostNine, check out this review at: best blog host, as it gives you the full low down on this particular hosting company.
Ok, that’s all for now folks. Choose your hosting company carefully and make sure you get the biggest bang for your buck. Oh, before I go, stay away from Dreamhost, as I have heard some bad things about them from some trusted colleagues, such as causing big problems when trying to move a large website (with a CMS) to another host and not releasing the database, then failing to answer support tickets. Not a good advertisement for a business, in my opinion.
Anyway, stay lucky, work hard and never give up!
