Options For Multiple Domain Hosting
July 31, 2008 – 10:23 pm
The incredibly low price of hosting plans and domain names has made it possible for one to afford numerous websites. The most logical choice for multiple websites is to host them under a single hosting company. Many hosts offer packages where several sites can be managed on a single account. Others allow separate accounts for individual sites to be hosted on a single server, which is typically a more expensive route.
Another option you have to is purchase individual domains with different companies. While this will cost a bit more, it has several advantages. The biggest advantage is that separate web hosts will provide every one of your sites with different IP addresses. This is an essential factor when you plan to link your sites together and make them all search engine friendly. Creating inbound links on each of your sites is something that can give you much higher ranking in a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. If these links originate from the same IP address, their ranking value may be discounted. Because of the importance of SEO in online marketing, a few web hosting companies now offer additional IP addresses with their packages. This is great for search engine optimization and creating a secure connection (HTTPS) for your site.
If you choose to host all of your sites with one company, there are three different options you can take advantage of. Each website could have it’s own account, you can purchase a reseller account, or you can purchase a dedicated server account.
Reseller Accounts
As a reseller, you are essentially acting as an agent for the parent web hosting provider. The company allocates a certain amount of bandwidth and disk space, allowing you to use these resources as you please. Depending on the company, there may be limits on the number of sites you can host with a reseller account. However, if after building your websites there is enough capacity on the allotted space, you can then turn a profit by selling hosting accounts to others. The major benefits of reseller hosting as that the parent company handles all of the technical aspects such as dealing with the server and protecting up time guarantees. Some companies will also provide secure gateways so that your clients can be properly invoiced.
Dedicated Hosting Accounts
Dedicated hosting gives you control of an entire web server. You have the freedom to allocate bandwidth and disk space as you wish, which can be used to host multiple domains or sell hosting packages to your own clients. The drawback of this option is that you are responsible for maintaining the server, a factor that requires a bit of technical knowledge. You can however, choose a managed hosting provider in which a company handles the dedicated server. Keep in mind that this option is far more expensive than traditional hosting.
Conclusion
While there are numerous benefits that come along with hosting multiple domains, there is one major disadvantage - downtime. If the server happens to go down because of a disaster, all of your sites go down with. This could be frustrating and very costly if you’re running several e-commerce sites. For this reason, you may want to consider hosting at least one of your sites with a different company. It is vary unlikely that the servers of two different hosts will be down at the same time.
