How many sites on one hosting account?
-
How many sites is safe to house on one hosting provider? I use BlueHost and they advertise unlimited domains, but I'm not sure what the negative side effects might be from hosting too many on one hosting service. If it matter at all, I'm using WordPress to build my sites.
Pros and Cons?
-
I have about 25 sites on an unlimited HostGator account right now ($8 per month I think), most of them get minimal traffic (few thousand visitors per month), but a couple of them are pushing 30k-50k per month and I will most likely have to move them.
Using it as a starting point is fine for new sites until they begin to gain traffic, then move them to better hosting.
That's my humble opinion anyway
-
I moved to a hostgator reseller and have had great success but have heard of the situations where even they will kill your sites if they get too much traffic.
Not saying any names but just about any host that offers you Unlimited Bandwidth is going to have some type of tripwire that throttles your traffic. If I moved a site there that burns terrabytes per day I can guarantee that a lot of these host would either kick you off or you will leave because you lost a ton of money the first day.
Sites that claim to offer unlimited resources.... your success is not in their best interest. They are not going to give you $700 worth of bandwidth for $4.99/month.
So, if you have a site that is starting to be successful, move it to a host who will charge you for all that you use. That host wants you to succeed because when you succeed they make more money... and when you call them for help they will do it gladly because they are helping you make more money.
-
Pros
Shared hosting is cheap. Really cheap.
Shared hosting is manged - you don't need to be a trained systems admin.
Cons
You don't have much control over the server environment. Some applications won't run, others might not run to their best ability. Did you hear about how cool node.js is? Too bad, you probably can't sandbox it.
You have no control over fixing downtime. You put in a ticket and hope someone takes care of it soon.
The server will be slow when anyone on the server hits a peak in traffic.
Support is generally subpar for shared hosting providers.
If the host hasn't secured the server, there could be security issues where others on the server could get access to your root directory or database.
Scaling? Ha, more like, when you grow you have to find a new server to migrate to and hope the process is fast and smooth. (It probably won't be)
Inevitably, many cost effective hosts will not be in your time zone. Or those near yours.
Suggestion
Shared hosting at the major hosts isn't too bad. If you can't afford the money (remember, this is tax writeoff material) then stick with them.
If you actually need the performance and such, find a way to pay for the upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated. A good dedicated server will be $100/m. You'll need to know basic sys admin stuff, but just knowing Linux in general and being familiar with the services you run (apache, mysql, postfix, php) and how they are configured is suitable.
Also if you are using a panel like cPanel.. your goal should one day to admin your own server without it. You'll be intimidated at first, but quickly find that you are more quickly able to do anything you need over command line.
-
I was on a different hosting service and my sites slowed to a crawl when I began to grow my company. I moved to a hostgator reseller and have had great success but have heard of the situations where even they will kill your sites if they get too much traffic. Either way you go, always have a backup and a plan B. From my experience a really good hosting service runs anywhere from $20/month and up. A great Wordpress hosting service is WPEngine, but only if you have the budget and traffic to constitute the price. I love them, great group of people there.
-
Majority of the time, or heck...ALL THE TIME, these hosting solutions that state unlimited everything is not true. The resources are for start up sites because they have hundreds of sites on one server.
Now the question is how much traffic is going to those sites? If you expect a decent amount of traffic, I suggest you get a VPS, which is more flexible in bandwidth use.
None the less, the most important thing is how much traffic you are getting currently. If all your sites generate a lot of traffic the site will get "suspended" and they will either ask you to upgrade or just completely kick you off.
BlueHost, I believe only has shared hosting and don't have dedicated or VPS solutions(last time I checked). I would go with maybe HostGator(a little pricey for shared and other solutions but speed is good). Best chances are going to a host that offers Shared, VPS, Dedicated Servers, so you can grow easily and move around easier.
Usually the hosts will be glad to upgrade you and even help you transition and transfer the files to the new VPS/Dedicated server.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How much is the site architecture impacting my site?
Hi there, I'm interested to learn how much the site archecture of griffith.ie (higher education) maybe impacting our rankings. In recent months there was some changes to the the faculty landing pages but not to the site archecture. The rankings in the last 6 months have dipped a little. There are two main path ways to get to the course. 1. Course finder - https://www.griffith.ie**/find-a-course** => 2. Faculties - https://www.griffith.ie**/faculties** Most of the SEO authority is coming through the Faculties pages as this is where all the courses are found in term of the url structure. For example; https://www.griffith.ie**/faculties/**business/courses/ba-hons-accounting-finance The UX on the site tells a different story and directs people to the course finder. /find-a-course Ideally, I feel the site would benefit much more if all the traffic was directed through the course finder however this would require (I think) a big redevelopment of the search tool and I feel we are diluting our efforts as when somebody arrives to the site through the homepage they go through the course finder and if they come through specific searches they get taken to the specific course page under the faculty section. the site has has this archecture for the best part of 4 years and I'm considering recommend a change if it would greatly improve SEO and UX. Any feedback on this would be great. Many Thanks Rob
Web Design | | robhough9091 -
International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration
What is the best way to configure a website that targets a number of countries and languages around the world? For example, Apple has websites optimized for just about every country and language in the world (see: https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/). When you choose the UK it takes you to: https://www.apple.com/uk/ When you choose China it take you to: https://www.apple.com/cn/ Etc. When you go to apple.co.uk it forwards you to the UK version of the website. The same is true for apple.cn. Is this the ideal way to set it up? I have also seen websites that have each version of the website on its own TLD such as exampleBrand.co.uk and exampleBrand.cn - in this example they don't forward to the .com. My concern with Apple's solution is SEO and hosting. Do consumers favor seeing their country's TLD in search results over exampleBrand.com/uk? For hosting, shouldn't the mainland China version of the website be hosted in China? Is it possible to just host a folder of a website in a certain country such as the cn folder for China? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I was unable to find much info on this.
Web Design | | rx3000 -
New ecommerce site: Close old site and full domain redirect or keep it linking to new site?
We have rebranded and are working on our new site (B). Our old site (A) has a much higher domain/page authority than our new site. Currently we have the original Site A still there, with all links/pages pointing to the new Site B when people click. I am unsure whether we'd be best to close down the Site A completely and do a full domain redirect to Site B. Site A: 10 years age and has a moderate amount of links to it.
Web Design | | ModowestNZ
Homepage - PA: 24 DA:11 Site B: 6 months age, few links
Homepage - PA: 1 DA:2 My concern with the full domain redirect is that the indexed/ranking pages would dissapear. The benefit is less brand confusion for our niche range of party accessories.0 -
Building a Mobile Site: Tools?
I've been tasked with re-building our company's mobile site and honestly have zero experience doing so. I know my way around HTML pretty well and have built several websites but never for mobile. Does anybody have any recommendations for me as far as tools to use to construct a proper mobile site? I basically want a simple page with four buttons on the front and a little drop down menu in the top corner. (not that this matters terribly but just saying, shouldn't need to be overly complicated.) Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | jesse-landry0 -
What happens if I 301 Redirect my homepage to a different page on site
If i were to 301 redirect the index page of my website to a page in a different subdirectory of my site would that adversely affect SEO? Does your home page need to be in the root of your site? I'm asking because a developer has told me that it would be best to do that since he needs to install OpenCart on the root of our domain...
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Migrating a site to Wordpress
I've recently been converting our old website to a wordpress based website and been working on the new version of the site on a subdomain. Now at the stage when I am getting ready to let the site go live and just wondering exactly how to do this so I have minimal downtime? Looking in the wordpress control panel there is the setting to enter the address of the site if you want it to be different from the directory it has been installed within - is this a good idea (i.e. is it stable if I do this? good for seo, bad for seo or makes no difference?)? or should I manually install everything in the root myself (if I do this is there a way to direct people to the temp version of the site on the subdomain? Any tips, do and don't s would be appreciated as I want to do this right!
Web Design | | Jon-C0 -
Still too many internal links reported on page
Hi Guys I am new here, and very much learning a lot, and enjoying the benefits of being an SEOMoz user. So here goes with my first question (probably of many). I have known for sometime that our website has a top heavy number of links in the primary navigation. But I wasn't too sure how important this was. Our main objective was to make an east to use nav for customers. All of the feedback we have had says that customers really like our navigation, as it is easy to use etc etc. However, when running an SEOMoz campaign on our site, again we got back that there are too many links on the pages. Example, home page has 500+ links. So I decided to do something about this. I have implemented what I think is a good solution where by the drop down navigation isn't loaded on first load. If the user then hovers over one of our "departments" the sub navigation is loaded via Ajax and dropped in. This means if the user wants it, they get it, if not then it's not loaded with the page. My theory being that Google loads the page without all the links, but a user gets the links as and when they need them. I tested with the SEOMoz toolbar and this tells me that when I load the home page there is 167 links in it vs 500+ previously. However, the my campaign still tells me that my home page has 450+ links (and this is a recent crawl of the page). Our site is here: www.uniquemagazines.co.uk Can you tell me is what I have done is a) a good solution and b) does the SEOMoz crawler have the ability to trigger the hover event and cause the AJAX load of the sub navigation content?
Web Design | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0