What Hosting Plan is Best for Your Sites?
Trying to figure out what hosting plan you should use for your sites can be a daunting task for even some of the more experienced niche marketers. However, there are some considerations that you should look into the future with where you are wanting to go with your sites. With shared hosting plans, reseller plans and now SEO hosting plans, which one should you choose? What are the good, the bad and the ugly problems that you can encounter with each over the long term for your plans to build money making sites?
Shared Hosting Plans
This is one of the most popular options that many people choose when they are first getting started with creating sites online. Why? Well, it is relatively inexpensive and you can host several (ok lots) of sites on the one plan. This gives you the most bang for the buck, so to say, to allow you to build your portfolio of online properties. Not all plans are shared however, you can even find some plans that will only allow you to have just one domain for the account, similar to the Host Gator Baby Croc plan.
Shared hosting plans are called that because you can share the resources of the server with other people. This isn’t a “dedicated” server just for you, which means that everyone on the server is sharing in the cost of it. When you are first starting out, most “shared” hosting plans are around the $6.95 to $7.95 per month range, however if you prepay for a one or two year service, you can often times reduce that price down to the $4 or $5 per month range.
When you create your account, you will have one primary domain. This can be either a domain you already have registered, or many companies will offer a free domain with the hosting plan as well. This is where the benefit comes in for someone that is just getting started. By using a feature of the account called “addon domains”, you are able to create “subfolders” under the primary account which will house additional domain files for you. This is a great feature to consider.
Now, the bad news about shared hosting plans. There really isn’t much, however there are some considerations to think about for your future planning.
First, remember you are sharing the server with other webmasters. Some of them, well probably most of them, are serious and working legitimate sites. However, sometimes you will find someone on the same server running a program that will hog the resources of the server causing a slower than normal page load time for your sites. This used to be a huge problem, but not so much anymore. Most companies have implemented “CPU Throttling” as a preventative measure. This is good if you aren’t running things you shouldn’t be, however if you have a faulty script on one of your sites like I did, it can throttle all of your sites and slow them all down. Keep an eye on your server logs and my biggest offender what the SlimStat WordPress plugin, so I switched over to StatPress Reloaded and it is working all better now.
Secondly, if there are any problems with one of your sites that would lead it to be suspended, usually the hosting company will shut down your whole account, not just that one site. If you use any autoblogging software or anything that scrapes content, you better be sure that you can legally use it. Most people aren’t that familiar with this stuff, but ocassionally you will be surprised when you see the DMCA (copyright violation notice) in your email account from your host telling you that you have “X” amount of time to reply to it or face your account being terminated. Trust me on this one, not a fun experience (wink…wink).
Overall, a shared hosting plan is a good way to start and learn how servers work. It is good for smaller sites and those starting to build super sites as well. One key here is that you have no control over the IP address that is assigned to your account. If you are going to build links to your own sites, you don’t want to use multiple sites on the same account to do this as the IP address is going to be the same, thus reducing the effectiveness of the link, even if the sites are similar in niche.
Reseller Hosting Accounts
The Reseller account, like the one through Host Gator, is a great way to expand your site collection into a more powerful system. Like the shared hosting plan, you are able to set up individual accounts on your main reseller account much like having numerous shared hosting plans under one master account. The great thing here is that you control each sites file space and bandwidth under this plan.
I have the “Aluminum” reseller package that provides 50 GB of space and 50 GB of bandwidth for the total account each month, which is plenty. So far I have about 100 sites on it and I can control each one and adjust the specific needs of a site quickly.
Another good thing is sometimes as the servers are moved around to optimize processor requirements, your sites are also moved around and obtain a new IP address. This is good, but don’t count on it as a good way to create your own SEO system of individual IP addresses for interlinking.
While the learning curve of managing this type of server is a little more than just “plug and play” with a shared hosting server, it isn’t tough to do, just a little more record keeping since each “account” that you create will also have it’s own FTP login data that you need to record.
The other nice part is that you can also use each account just like a shared account and host “addon” domains under each one as well. Plus, if you are adventurous, you can sell space on your server to other people and make money, hence it being the “Reseller” account.
SEO Hosting
If you are truly wanting to build your own network of sites for SEO purposes, this is the way to go. With SEOHosting.com, you have the ability to have your own selection of IP addresses available to you to use will allow you to interlink your sites more specifically for better SEO linking.
While I don’t know for certain, but do speculate, that the search engines **cough** Google **cough** knows about this method, to discount the links would be bad for them as a whole. You see, SEO Hosting is owned by Host Gator and they utilize the spectrum of IP address they own to allow you where you want to host your sites.
Much like the Reseller control panel, the SEOHosting panel adds one option that will allow you to select the IP address that you want the “primary domain” to use.
For example, if you create an account on the package that provides 5 IP address (which I have and use), you create a primary domain, so you can have 5 primary domains in this account. The more IP addresses you purchase, the more domains you can host as primary domains. So, don’t let that scare you if you think that you have 100 domains and need 100 IP addresses, no so. Just like the reseller and the shared hosting plan, you can use the “addon” domain function under each primary domain to host additional domains.
With the 5 IP address package, I am hosting a total of about 15 domains right now, and will be adding more soon as addon domains.
As you can see from my long winded article that has nothing on Griz with some of his, I hope I have covered some of the basic options that you can have with exploring what type of hosting is best for your niche sites. If you have any questions, fire away and let’s share experiences and knowledge!
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Hey Elliott,
Great article I enjoyed how you laid out the different options available. I believe that as people move towards having two or three larger sites, or supersites, they are going to want to read and understand this post. I might add that I’ve heard it isn’t too difficult to move from a shared hosting account on hostgator to a reseller account. In other words, you could have two or three supersites on a shared account and when they started getting a lot of traffic you can move them to a reseller account. Of course, I for one am chicken when it comes to moving things around on a site that is getting a lot of traffic.
I agree, hostgator is the best shared hosting plan. Second to none service and they give you all the domains you want.