Multiple Hosting: Is it necessary for starters?

[yaji]

Well not actually brand new starters. This is not the question for huge number of web sites owners for sure... But if you have, say, 20-30 web sites, adsense enabled, are you going to stick to the current hosting company to save money as they claim unlimited space/domains, or it's time to go outside to purchase another hosting with a different IP address ONLY for SEO purposes? It it worth the money to do that investment?

OR, is there a hosting company that will assign each of your addon domains to different IP, which is really helpful SEO-wise, at the same time making managing all those web sites easier as they are in athe same account/hosting environment?

Thank you for your inputs in advance.

[dvduval]

If I had 20-30 I would probably have 2-3 hosts. I currently have about 120 sites, and have about 6 different hosting accounts.

[yaji]

Wow, so you do this simply for SEO purposes only? True? Thanks.

[Dan Grossman]

The whole "host your sites on different IP ranges to fool Google" thing stopped working half a decade ago when they became a registrar, then made their algorithm much harder to game with a network of sites no matter who owns them.

It's abuse of the limited IP space (which will run out in just a few years, hence all the prep for IPv6), and not helpful.

The only reason to have multiple hosts is if you're worried about all the sites being down if the host goes down. I have about 50 active domains, and all but 4 are on the same server.

[bgmacaw]

The way I've been doing this is not to put more than 30 WordPress or other database driven sites on a single shared host and about twice that number for static HTML or non-database using PHP.

This helps spread things out so far as hosting is concerned so that if one host has a problem (your bandwidth usage, outages, or whatever), not all of your sites are affected.

So far as the SEO IP address thing goes, it's not clear how much it affects things. As Dan said, Google is a registrar and has access to domain ownership records. However, this doesn't seem to be built directly into the primary search indexing algorithm but would come into play in the case of a visual inspection of some type. I wouldn't get an extra hosting account based on getting a new IP address alone but splitting up domains is a good idea for other reasons.

[Mark Brian]

Originally Posted by Dan Grossman

The whole "host your sites on different IP ranges to fool Google" thing stopped working half a decade ago when they became a registrar, then made their algorithm much harder to game with a network of sites no matter who owns them.

I'm not sure if that is absolutely true because one company I've work for has hundreds of websites in different IPs and they dominate the first page of Google in the same set of keywords.

[Diane S]

I use HostGator at the aluminum level, about 25 bucks per month. I noticed recently that I now have sites on 2 different class-c IP addresses, whereas before all my sites were assigned to the same class-c IP address. It is nothing I asked for, it just happened. Maybe I reached a certain number of domains on my reseller account? Maybe the first class-C got full and they went on to a second one for my newest sites? Regardless of the reason, I could carefully keep track of which of my sites was linked to another of my sites and be sure I was using different class-c's for that interlinking. It is not the algorithm we are fooling, it is a visual inspection by a living, breathing Google employee we hope to pass.

[robmena]

If you have a large amount of sites I wouldn't get on a shared server, what a shared server is when other sites are on the same server as yours and site A can have alot of traffic and site B wont have any, but still feel the effects of site A. I know everyone talks about these 3.99 plans and they can be fine at times, but I would go with your own dedicated server that can run you about 30 - 50 and up dollars, like I said it all depends, but if your taking things seriously you need to be on your own server with your own sites all on it. On a dedicated server you can put as many sites as you want with there own IPs, but its really up to what you need or want.

[Dan Grossman]

A managed VPS is the logical next step from shared hosting, not a full server. Especially not an unmanaged one; unless you've studied system administration, you'll just get hacked.

[yaji]

So most of you guys agree that hosting in multiple servers is to prevent sites from being down all at the same time, not for different IP purposes.

I know for experienced IMers who already made some money so they are willing to have a more expensive plans like dedicated hosting. But for starters, is it OK we put everything in one hosting account, but back them up regularly at home and once that hosting is down, let it host it at home for a couple of days (I know how to do it and periodically I mirror all my stuff at home)? The IM sites are mostly static contents plus MySql DB which is super easy to back them up and get them running again.

The reason is, for starters, if spreading your hostings cannot help your SEO, we'd rather put all sites in one hosting account to save money, until we can make money to buy dedicated server.

Does this sound stupid, or not?

[LoreCee]

About getting different IPs for SEO purposes, even Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz got it wrong when he said Google could see your domains because it's a registrar, even if you get private registration. Google can see GoDaddy's Domains by Proxy because it's a member of the GoDaddy registrar network, but they can't pry open other registrars' private registration without a subpoena. (Of course, that's where most of us register, so there you go.)

If you're running AdSense on 12 sites, Google will know those sites are related because they're all on the same AdSense account. But I have some support sites that I host on different IPs for SEO purposes. Hostgator has a 5-IP account for $35 a month, FYI.

[JaredKels]

Its better to have multiple hostings in google's eyes. I agree!