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How many sites on a server

by seosheffield
10 replies
Hope someone can shed some light for me. I have a network of affiliate websites, all pretty new (and just took a hammering with the last algorithm update!).

Long term we are hoping to get them all past the stage of one page wonder sites, but are not sure how many sites to have on each server. All the URLs are mixed in topic, so we are trying to add only unrelated websites to the same servers. Out of 1000 url's does 25 per server seem sensible?

I'd rather know now than later when we are either not performing or spending too much on too many servers! I work in SEO but haven't managed this many blogs / sites before.

Cheers, Neil
#affiliate marketing #blogs #seo #server #sites
  • Profile picture of the author jbode
    depends highly on bandwidth (probably most important factor)

    you need to know the bandwidth of your sites (check your cpanel) and the bandwidth of your server
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    • Profile picture of the author ARVolund
      Actually the most important factor is usually cpu usage. You can almost always add bandwidth to your plan. The only time bandwidth is usually an issue is if you have a site or sites that get traffic in a big burst. Honestly though that is very rarely and issue for affiliate type sites.

      Richard


      Originally Posted by jbode View Post

      depends highly on bandwidth (probably most important factor)

      you need to know the bandwidth of your sites (check your cpanel) and the bandwidth of your server
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  • Profile picture of the author seosheffield
    presuming they have sufficient bandwidth, do you know of any issues with having multiple affiliate sites on one server? do the search engines look out for that kind of stuff?

    thanks for the quick response jbode
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    • Profile picture of the author ARVolund
      How long is a piece of string? There is really no answer to your question, there are just too many factors to consider.

      What type of sites? static or dynamic

      How much traffic?

      How heavy are the pages? Lots of images or mostly text

      Is the traffic steady or does in come all at once?

      What are the specs of the server itself? This makes a huge difference...


      There are some sites that need a server all to itself or even more than one and then there are servers out there with 1000's of sites on them.



      If you have a bunch of low traffic sites that you think are going to grow substantially then what I would do is set them up in groups of 50 or 100 on your server using a different set of nameservers for each group. This makes it really easy to transfer them to a new server as you need to start splitting them off.

      The server starts getting close to being overloaded and you just pick the most demanding group or two and move them to a new box. Much easier than moving them over one by one.


      Richard
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    • Profile picture of the author Dennis Gaskill
      Originally Posted by seosheffield View Post

      presuming they have sufficient bandwidth, do you know of any issues with having multiple affiliate sites on one server? do the search engines look out for that kind of stuff?

      thanks for the quick response jbode
      If you have common items like the same affiliate code, or same affiliate user name, they will know anyway whether you use separate IP's or not, unless you use redirects and keep the spiders away from the redirect directory.
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      • Profile picture of the author seosheffield
        Kev- that's what I thought. They don't have high levels of traffic and won't ever be huge in content that isn't mainly text.

        ARVolund- Mainly text, steady traffic but to be honest I don't reckon bandwidth or page loading speed will be an issue, I just didn't want to find out later on that the search engines dislike this type of thing, and try to find websites related via servers / IP addresses. Nameservers sounds like a great idea to look at.

        Jbode- a key point of what we are doing is none of the sites link to each other, so presume it's just the server that they they are on that links them?

        Dennis - I never considered this and it may be an issue as we don't change affiliate codes to redirect. Will look at this.

        Thanks everyone.
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        • Profile picture of the author ARVolund
          There are really only two times that having all your sites on the same ips will be a problem.

          First if you are trying to link from some of your sites to others to help them attain rankings. Since you are not doing this not a problem.

          The only other time would be if you were doing something that Google would not like especially adsense related. In this case having the same info for all your sites would make it easier to find all your sites. Chances are though if you have adsense on the sites they are all on the same account anyway.

          If you are not linking the sites then the ip addresses do not really matter. I would break them into groups just to make it easier to separate them later but it is not going to have any effect on getting your sites ranked. There are servers with 1000's of non related sites sharing the same ip's. that is how the system is setup and even with that they will be running out of them in a couple of years. If you wanted to get a separate ip address for each site is would be pretty expensive with 1000 sites. Depending on your host it is usually $1 or $2 a month for each one over and above your hosting costs.

          Richard
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  • Profile picture of the author jbode
    Yes, it does affect your search engine placement, if you're linking related affiliate sites

    You could get a server with multiple C class IPs dedicated to it
    this would make it harder for the search engines to recognize that you own both sites
    you'll also want to hide your whois info in that case
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    • Profile picture of the author ~kev~
      Originally Posted by jbode View Post

      You could get a server with multiple C class IPs dedicated to it
      Why does it have to be class C ips? Wouldn't class A or B work just as well?

      Depending on how much traffic you get, 25 sites sounds great to me - especially if your just starting out.

      I run 2 vbulletin forums, and 3 wordpress blogs on a quad core dedicated server with 8 gigs of memory. The vbulletin forum alone gets about 10,000 unique hits daily, and around 3.4 - 4 million pae views monthly.
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  • Profile picture of the author Troy_Phillips
    Really depends on the type of site .

    A static site can usually get by on 70 mb

    Wordpress, 3 post per week .. 100 mb

    One of my social bookmarking sites runs around 2000 mb

    V-bulletin ... better go dedicated lol.
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