Multiple Sites On Shared Hosting?

[azlan]

Hi hope some members can clear up some confusion for me. Does it hurt your sites SEO wise to put your niche sites all on a shared hosting plan? It's a good way to save some money if you're just starting out but wondering if all the effort in building sites might come to nothing if they're all on the same shared hosting.

Is it better to split up a few sites or better to put each site on its own dedicated class c ip? Or does it really matter where u host them and can just bung them all on the same ip? Will this hurt rankings? What are your thoughts and do any of you have any practical experience? Like to hear your views on this and much appreciated, thanks.

 

[Nymph]

Really, it's a matter of preference and how much load the host server or provider can handle or is known for handling. The higher quality hosts like HostGator, GoDaddy, etc. will handle many, many sites fine on one shared plan, while resellers or less powerful hosts might not be able to handle as much. Fortunately, technology, faster connections and datacenters today aren't that fragile and will definitely handle whatever you need on one plan. The dedicated ips and hosting plans are nowadays more for individual sites that take up a -lot- of disk space and/or bandwidth. If your site isn't social networking you probably won't need a dedicated host for all your sites.

 

[azlan]

Cool, so theoretically, I could rank all the sites on one hosting plan if the SEO for each site was done correctly?

 

[Nymph]

Your hosting plan has nothing to do with your ranking, and although Google tends to favor faster loading websites, the difference in loading time will be milliseconds or less with virtually no weight on your ranking if you put all your sites on one plan or server. Your site will have to be huge with thousands of active members or traffic uploading and downloading from your site before it slows down enough that you need a dedicated hosting plan for a site. So, yes, it's better to put them all on one hosting plan and see if you really want to put a few on a dedicated server. Almost every time there will be no need for websites below 10K visitors per day. Of course, this depends on if your site tends to be heavy on bandwidth (think sites like rapidshare).

 

[azlan]

This is good to know. I was a bit unsure because when I was trying to rank 4 or 5 sites which I had hosted on the same server, I noticed a lot of the times I got traffic to one site but not the other then it would change again, receiving traffic to the other site but no longer to the first one. I'm still going to persevere with this owing to your advice and see how I get on.

 

[vash]

I use Hostgator as my web site host. The plan I use is called "Business Plan". I used to have just one web site until early this year. When I added a second web site, it automatically created a subdomain under my first web site for the second web site. Although I didn't like it but it didn't seem to do any harm. The subdomain isn't even used since the second web site still has its full domain listed. I just think it is totally unnecessary to have this sub-domain thing. As far as the SEO go, I don't see any difference or disadvantage... yet.

 

[thebrad]

I wouldn't say it may slow down your site but i don't think it would slow down the bots as they just roam and collect information as normal i would say not sure but this is what i'm thinking.