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As I discussed recently, I prefer to host my niche websites on Bluehost (read my review here). However, is it really a good idea to have all of your niche websites on the same server? Are there risks associated with having your sites all in one place? What options are there for hosting lots of sites?
These are some of the questions that I will provide some to today. Overall, this is a little bit more advanced subject and in fact may not apply to many of you that only have a site or two. However, if you plan on building lots of sites, these are some things you should be thinking about.
Before I go into some of the specific details, I wanted to explain why I even considered these questions in the first place. As I built more and more sites, I used to host them all on just one Bluehost account. However, once I hit 100 sites I essentially ran out of space (limited SQL databases); so I got a new hosting account.
The real kicker however was when I had some issues with some of my sites (i.e. a few got deindexed). You can hear me talk about this experience and others in my 1st Podcast here.
Essentially, I had an issue with one site that spread to many others on the same hosting. It was my own fault (an outdated an vulnerable WordPress plugin), and I should have caught it, but I didn't and it effected many of my other sites. So, one reason you might want to have multiple hosting accounts is to diversify your assets in case anything happens to one of them.
This could even mean if for some reason Google decides to penalize one of your sites, they may just decide to penalize other sites that are related. I would never intentionally do anything to get on Google's bad side, but as I have experienced, and many others with the recent Panda update – sometimes things happen to your site even though you thought you were playing by the rules.
So, reason number one for using multiple hosting is to diversify away from potential penalties effecting all your sites instead of just one or two.
How Many Sites Per Hosting Account?
I'm sure I will get asked this question, so let me discuss it here. First of all, most of you probably will never have to worry about this. If you only have 10 sites or so – just host them all on the same hosting. Unless they are each earning a significant amount, then you might want to consider diversifying.
However, once you start getting 30, 40, or 50 sites – it might be time to start thinking about a second hosting account. The call is yours.
However, I now typically only put about 30 or so sites on one hosting account. In fact, I have 5 different Bluehost accounts, 1 HostGator account, and 1 account with SEOHosting.com (with 5 Multiple Class C IPs). I may be overcautious, and you can certainly get away with hosting more sites on a single hosting account.
But if you are going to be building a large number of niche websites; these are some of the things you have to think about.
Why Multiple Class C IP Hosting?
This subject probably deserves an entire post, which I may do in the future. But essentially Multiple Class C IP Hosting is hosting that allows you to have 1 account, but to host sites on 5, 10, or more different Class C IP addresses. You can get a good definition of C Class IPs and why they are important right here, if you don't already know.
Its potentially beneficial for a number of reasons: first I already mentioned the diversification of your assets. Second, some believe that having too many sites on 1 IP address can actually make your sites perform poorly in the search engines. I don't know that this is really true or not – only Google really knows. But having a dedicated IP with only a few sites on it certainly looks much cleaner.
Another reason that people use Multiple Class C IP hosting is to interlink sites. That's right, they link to themselves! Don't act like you haven't thought of this before.
The problem with having your sites on one hosting account, is that its easier to detect if you are interlinking your sites; however, on Multiple Class C IP hosting; the links are all coming from various IP address which makes it look much more natural.
Whether this is something you want to do or not is up to you. Let me just say that I have not interlinked my Multiple Class C sites. Early on in my “career” with niche sites, I did link a few of my sites – but saw more advantage to just building other types of links.
So, my advice would be to just avoid linking your sites altogether UNLESS there is a good reason to. If they are related sites, then go for it.
For example, I frequently link to my own site LongTailPro.com from my blog here – but this makes natural sense for me to do and I'm not doing it to manipulate the search engines – I'm doing it because I have a product that readers of this blog are interested in.
In Conclusion
Overall, I have really just brushed over the subject, but hopefully I have given you something to think about. If you only have 10 or 20 niche websites, you probably don't need to worry about getting a second hosting account or Multiple Class C IP Hosting. However, if you have 30 or more, you should probably start thinking about this if you have not already.
Really, you can certainly still have 100 niche websites on 1 hosting account, but you run the risk of slower performance from your host AND the risk of 1 negative issue on 1 of your sites affecting all of your sites. So, the primary reason for using different hosting accounts is to diversify any potential risks.
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. I am sure that many of you have differing opinions on the subject – which is great! We can all learn from each other here. I have shared my opinion on the subject, now tell me what you think…
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“This could even mean if for some reason Google decides to penalize one of your sites, they may just decide to penalize other sites that are related.”
Thanks for the post Spencer. Could you elaborate on this topic a bit?
Well, as explained Google could “slap” you site for various reasons (I wish I knew all the reasons) or you site could become victim to a virus, malicious script, or other attack. These things could cause Google to de-rank or otherwise penalize your site. For a number of reasons, this could lead Google to look for other similar sites and apply the same penalties to those. Hope that helps.
It does and thanks for the explanation.
I understand an individual site could get slapped for whatever reason, but I am still confused about G slapping several or all sites on the same hosting account for the mistakes of one site.
If I make all of my sites “look different” how does G know they are mine?
On that note if I am on a shared hosting account I could get slapped or deindexed for the actions of others on the same account. Is this correct?
Thanks Spencer
Kept reading and found your answer on this topic. Thanks for the interesting post.
YH
I’ve mentioned this in another comment, but it was relevant here so:
Check out IndiaNets:
http://www.indianets.com/seo-shared.php
..for multi C Class hosting. It’s more expensive than normal hosting, but you get a much wider IP spread and you reduce and obfuscate your google ‘footprint’ somewhat.
I own many hundreds of sites (I peaked at 600-700 last year but have dropped back a little now) and I rarely put more than 10 sites on a single IP address.
IndiaNets are a small and friendly outfit that I’ve been with for years and their servers are spread our over many US data centres, so you get a variety of A & B class too. They’re cheaper than many of the other ‘SEO’ multi C Class hosts and they’re very reliable with full CPanel/CRON control etc.
I think it’s around $150 per month for 50 IP’s with 5 sites on each – so 250 sites. You can start small from 5 IP’s though.
Thanks again for sharing! I may have to check them out as I know you have mentioned this a few times. So far seohosting.com has been great as well though.
I appreciate this post. It helps me plan out when I should start diversifying my sites on different hosts. I have 2 hosting accounts currently, 1 with Hostgator and 1 with Bluehost. I originally started with Hostgator but the performance of my hosting service is really poor. So I’m in the process of moving my sites to Bluehost.
Thanks so much for the insight!
Steve Eason
Hey Steve – sounds like you are already thinking about your next step, so great job. Its important to have a plan that includes hosting and the ability to grow. Best of luck moving all your sites over!
Hi,
Just checked with SEOhosting (part of hostgator!!) and they will move 50 sites from my current cpanel free of charge. but to only one of the IP’s/Cpanels. Still its part fo the job.
Moving site is ok just boring. Just moved 16 today 🙁 so moving again is no so much fun, I guess i should have planned more LOL.
regards
Great! Yes, moving sites is a tedious task – I don’t enjoy it at all!
Another reason to have multiple hosting account is to avoid some “internet marketer” to steal your keyword. Let say I got one of spencer’s niche site URL. I can use the reverse IP method to find out other niche site which yet to be developed. Not sure how many IM are doing this, but I do read about this method before.
True as well. Sites can of course be tracked by Analytics code, Adsense code, and other ways as well.
Totally agree, I got email from bluehost when I’m attending a seminar. They told me that due to excessive backup I made they must suspend my account until I delete old archive. Yes, 27 domain got hold for 5 hours and I believe I lost my potential income during that downtime. That lesson make me move some of them to other webhost and thanks to ssh technology that supported by my webhost, I can move 15 domain quickly and decrease the load too. Spread the risk and minimize down time.
Great points, and sorry to hear about your experience 🙁
I got into the Class C IP thing for my link directory portion of my businesses, as a client demanded each directory to be on separate ip’s.
So since I had them, I started adding all my new sites to them, so I could start interlinking some sites. So far it seems to work well!
I got bitch slapped for linking several (related) sites on the same host so I think there is benefit to the Class C ip’s.
But in the end, who knows…other than the big G.
Very interesting – I agree that there are some benefits to class c ips.
I’ve had this in mind just recently because I wanted to create a ‘mini net’ of some of the local sites I’d like to make. Likewise, I’d like to utilize multiple hosts with client websites with taglines at the bottom such as ‘Designed by X’ which is quite common so I don’t think things like this would get slapped because people have been doing this for yeaaaaars.
It does mean that more money is going toward expenses but like you said, it’s good for asset relocation so if one thing goes down, it’s not all lost.
Murray – sounds like a good idea. If you go down this road, you will definitely need to have class c ip hosting. Best of luck with the venture!
Spencer,
1 question, do you prefer VPS or Dedicated for Hosting
Hi Spencer
Ive been planning for this since i had only 2 sites.
Having built 20 and aquired another 16 this week its time to do something about it 🙂
A timely post and Ive looked at seohosting myself before.
My only other thought was to use a hostgator hosting account with Multi IP’s but they want justification for each additional ip. a pain 🙂
regards
Actually, seohosting.com is a hostgator company. So if you like hostgator, you will like seohosting.
Can you explain why Google would penalize all your sites just because they are on the same server?
Well, as explained in the post – perhaps a malicious script is found on one of your sites. Either the script itself might spread to other sites on the same host – or Google may just feel like its better to look at the other sites on the same hosting account and take a pre-emptive strike. I wish I knew all the reasons google might potentially “slap” sites, but I and many others have found that these “slaps” can happen to several sites at once that share hosting.
One more point, just in case one server goes down, it would only hurt a portion of your money-making sites.
It just happened to me 2 days ago that the server at Hostgator went down. This was just a rare case. Although it was resolved in 30 mins to an hour, I was thinking.. how much income I was missing during that period of time.
Good point Kent!
i agree about the separate C-class….most people think just buying a VPS with multiple ip’s is enough but they are usually the same c-class…..
spencer, do you use google analytics still on all your sites or something different?
I don’t use it on alot of sites. But I am going back to them with a few. If I start using them again, I will be setting up several different analytics accounts to keep it diversified. I have been using Piwik stats, and I don’t like them as much.
Perfect timing for this post Spencer! I was just contemplating this last night as my adsense portfolio is rapidly expanding.
How important do you think it is to spread your hosting load across different hosting companies?
Its probably ideal to use multiple hosting companies, but I think this is pretty low on the “importance” scale.
Curious if you have dealt with this yet Spencer.
I use Hostmonster (brother to Bluehost) and their new “CPU Throttling” feature is killing me. I currently only have 9 sites on that one account, but I have been seeing more and more downtime due to throttling in the last 2.5 months or so.
(I’ve done my due diligence and have mitigated everything I can)
With you having 20+ sites per account, I would expect that you are dealing with that to some degree as well. True?
I haven’t noticed any issues with this.
Great article. This was new to me.
Whats your view on seohosting.com? They have the same drawbacks as hostgator you mentioned in your bluehost/hostgator comaparison? Anything else?
Overall, I have been happy with them – its just the minor downsides that I mentioned in my previous post comparing hostgator and bluehost.
What is the reason for not using Analytics on all your sites? You think Google is using it to group sites/owners and penalize them? How do you track the performance without it?
Wouldn’t it be a critical to track the performance of your sites especially since you seem to be Adsense focused? As a matter of fact I would love to see some post around how you analyze the performance of you sites sand how you incorporate the conclusions into improvement actions
Thanks for a great site
Dan, I came from the autoblog side of things and rule of thumb was to never use google analytics because they track everything. I didnt really have anything to hide necessarily but i prefer to not give them everything about my site(i use free Statcounter instead to see all stats in one place and you can see everything in statcounter pretty much regarding keywords search to find your site,etc…..also there is an awesome heatmap plugin i got for cheap that I use now on a couple sites that are more important to me. the highest rated stats
Yes, Google can track your sites through analytics. Its possible in theory that Google would penalize a group of sites using the same analytics account – yes. I have used Piwik stats. May I may just start creating multiple analytics accounts for smaller groups of sites because I really like the way Google analytics works/ease of use. I agree that this would be a good post as well.
Great post as usual Spencer. We limit ourselves to between 250 and 400 sites per hosting account on GoDaddy. After that I find the system gets pretty slow, especially with so many DBs. Even though GoDaddy is supposed to be “unlimited”, they admit things get bad after 200 sites or so.
I wish there was a hosting platform that catered to people like us, but gave us the tools on the back end we need. Simple things like DB name search and bulk DB creation. It would make things so much easier!
Wow, 250 to 400 sites on one hosting is pretty impressive! I agree – it would be great if there was that “perfect” hosting platform created for niche website owners…interesting thought…
Spencer,
Your last 2 posts about hosting and bluehost have convinced me to make the switch or at least add another hosting account while keeping my hostgator account. I know you aren’t doing much to monetize this blog currently but whenever I am going to make a purchase I will be using your links because although I listen to a lot of other people in the IM space, I relate to your story the best and I find myself getting value from everything you put out there.
I don’t have the Spencer “eye of the tiger” to put out 100 sites in 30 days but I am putting out 8 in September and shooting for 10 in October. At this point I have to do all the content and most of the backlinking myself, but as I make more money I will be moving to your style of outsourcing all of that stuff on a per job basis. Thanks for all the great information you provide.
Hi Spencer,
Very nice post. I am a great Blue host plan as well. As you have mentioned that they do limit 100 sql data bases per account. However, since I know that you use wordpress for your sites, you can install multiple wordpress sites on a single database with changing the prefix during installation.
However, It has its own cons though. I started installing 4 to 5 wordpress sites on one database.
Cheers~
Naveen
I’m glad you brought this up Spencer. I’m currently in the process of building 1 niche site a week (I’m at 1 so far, haha!). But at the rate I’m going, I will be at 30-40 sites in a matter of months, so I’m glad I read this. I use HostGator, and they have always worked great for me. They are fairly priced, so I wouldn’t mind paying a little more for a second hosting account to stay on the safe side.
I have a contract deal to have all my niche websites grid-hosted and backed up by multiple servers, so there doesn’t seem to be a problem with any of the sites being down for the most part. I know most people don’t have that opportunity of such quality hosting for smaller niche websites – but I’ve been fortunate to operate in that fashion. polarPhase serves me well!
Hey Spencer. Sorry to both you with another question but I was wondering how do I host multiple niches on my server? I use bluehost too.
Do I just upload each website’s folder to /public_html/NicheSiteFolder/ ?
and then how do i get my website, NicheSiteFolder.com to direct to my /public_html/NicheSiteFolder/ ?
I bought the domains on godaddy.
Thanks!
Hm… So i figured out i can forward from godaddy.com. Still wondering about the question, but i think i shot the gun too soon and might figure it out before you respond. Sorry!
Just go into godaddy and point the domains to your nameservers – (probably ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com). Then in bluehost just add the domains as an addon domain. Then you should be set.
Hi Spencer,
Do you only use one adsense account to monetize all your sites?
I have read that google can easily bunch your sites together if their all on adsense. And i have read of many people having all their sites de-indexed because they look similar and are backlinked in a similar way etc etc (looks spammy).
What other things do you do to protect yourself from possible de-indexing (appart from multiple hosting accounts)?
No, I have 4 adsense accounts. I diversify greatly. I have several hosting accounts. I use multiple class C hosting. I use multiple Google analytics accounts or use Piwik stats for my analytics. I also use different themes on all sites and keep sites diversified as much as possible.
Hi Spencer,
Great post and great information, especially as I will soon start some serious niche site generation. At present I have several supersites that provide me a full-timeincome, but I need to diversify, and am gearing up to create several 100 niche sites – some to hole on to and some to flip.
I am glad Daniel asked the question about adsense accounts. The first thing on my mind is that I don’t want a 100 or more website all on the same adsense ID.
So how did you go about getting 4 adsense accounts? Do yo have a personal account, one business account, then use family members for extra accounts? I ask because I know there is one account limited to one SSN, if I am correct?
BTW – I bought LongTailPro today, and it is awesome. It is almost supernatural how you have programmed it to collect keywords so quickly. I have use MS and Serp Attacks and they are not even close seconds. So fast, it blew my mind. It’s worth its money a 100 times over.
Darren
I have 3 business entities that each have an account – then I have a personal account. 4 adsense accounts.
Thanks for the quick review of Long Tail Pro – glad you are LOVING it!!
Thanks for the article concerning different hosting accounts.
I had a big issue with the hosting company and they shut down my account due to having about 40 site and traffic overloading their server. This particular host did not give me any prior warning concerning the issue or help me to resolve the issue. They just ask me to get a VPS server which I have to pay more money and they will not issue me a refund that I prepaid for three years of hosting and I only been with them for about 5 months.
If I can mention the name, is TMDhosting.com.
It’s a fast and reliable hosting but will not refund if you get banned and will not help customer to solve any issue if any script that you installed would cause their server to overload such as: Forum scripts, wordpress or others.
Bad way of dealing with customers.
Hope it would help with those considering to host with TMDHosting or having many sites on one hosting account.
Sorry to hear about your experience sam.
Spencer,
Quick praise here. You’ve inspired myself, my wife and my father-in-law to really get our butt’s into high gear. We have a goal of a minimum of 20 new sites a month (hopefully 30/month once we really nail down our system). We have built 30 sites so far. We’ve made mistakes and are learning along the way. But we are nearly doubling our Adsense earnings every month so far, plus some random income from Amazon and some Clickbank products.
We want to diversify from the beginning and do things as right as possible. We’re only sticking 30-40 sites into each Adsense account, the same 30-40 sites into Analytics accounts, and possibly keeping the same 30-40 in separate hosting accounts for organizational purposes.
We’ve started with 1 standard level bluehost hosting account.
We’re now trying to figure out whether we go with say a 5 IP class C hosting account or whether we get another standard level account with another host. Forking out $35/month for IP C hosting compared to the $5.95/month for Bluehost kinda hurts, especially when we’re still spending more than we’re making every month.
I’m wondering if changing the IP address, i.e. moving your website to another server (maybe even in another country) has a big effect on the rankings. I did that with one of my sites and didn’t notice much of a change but maybe you have more experience with it?
I have no experience with this.
Hey Spencer,
How do you create the different business entities to have 4 adsense accounts?
Toki
You will have to look in your own state. I have formed LLC (a legal business entity with my state). So, search for how to form an LLC (or other business entity) in your state.
Thanks! Quick question, so you have formed 4 LLC’s to have 4 accounts?
Toki
3 LLCs, 1 personal account.
Why did you need 3 LLCs? Were they all based in your home state or did you do some in Nevada, Wyoming etc.?
Hi, what a great website, I’ve just discovered it and it’s brilliant with tons of good info, thank you!
I have a question, sorry if it’s already been covered…
When registering domain names do you register them all under 1 account or do you spread these around like the hosting and Adsense accounts?
I understand that google has access to site registration info and wondered whether tieing them all to the same registration would be a bad signal?
Thanks again for the great site,
Darren
Darren:
All my domains are under 1 account. Some people do use different registration names, etc…but for the most part, I do not.
Hey Spencer first off I’d like to say excellent information. I made a online web directory script and would like to multiply it into 100 sites, I was debating on using multiple servers or not but after reading the article and the Q&A I’ve come to the conclusion I will, thinking 3 vps 35 sites each give or take. Question – how much do I have to tweek the theme for each Site so adsense doesn’t think I’m releasing the same Site over and over again(which is not my intent) I see alot of online web directories using the same script, does having less sites on a server help keeping the websites unique and independent?
Phil: you can always use different themes. You can also check out the Niche Website Theme (my product): http://www.nichewebsitetheme.com. Makes customizing look of each site very easy.
Spencer, I’m doing something old school. I’m working on a shell directory website, mentioned. It is for a local search for the subject plumbers. I’m building the network of all 25,000+- towns in America, in hopes of selling ad spots, and take advantage of possible Adsense revenue. The idea is to keep the site simple so it loads well on mobile devices and PC/laptops. Ads are placed presently at the heat spots I’ve determined to be the best. Once complete, I plan to use that website as a template for about 300 other website subjects – all the key things local searches are done for. I.E. restaurants, attorneys, locksmith, etc. I plan to do a sitewide search and replace, plumbers for locksmith, for example. Other than that, I don’t plan to alter the shell/template much. What do you advise? Should I purchase 30 Delux hosting accounts for about 10 each websites? Alter the colors? Should I just make it one big site (7.5 million pages)? Am I going to have problems with G? How to proceed? Thanks for your attention.
I would stick to separate sites, rather than 1 big one. I would recommend proving the model can work on one site before I move onto others. Once the first site is profitable, move onto other sites and worry about hosting, templates, etc at that point.
Spencer,
Can you help me understand this? I have 10-15 sites all hosted on the same plan with bluehost. I have 2-3 in one niche and 2 more in another niche, etc. I recently had my adsense account shut down and 1 site deindexed by google. I was using fiverr and other cheap links and content writing so I am sure that is why I got smacked.
Should I be concerned with creating backlinks from one site to the next within bluehost? I want to have one niche site with other relative sites linking to it but really can afford mutliple hosting plans. Any suggestions?
How much were you paying Bluehost a month to host 15 sites?
Bluehost is about $6.95/mth. You can host 50+ sites on one account.
Ah, this is the info I was looking for. Made a comment regarding this in another post and for the life of me can’t find my way back to it (getting lost in all your content! ) 🙂
Not sure if this has been asked yet, but don’t you run into problems with too many processes running on your server when having multiple sites running on the same hosting plan?
I have only 2 sites on my Hostgator account and have had my site go down on a few occasions. Apparently the reason was because my email programs were pinging to the server too often. Even after I changed the settings in my email programs to only check mail “manually”, I still get around 8 out of the allowed 20 (I think) processes running. If I had multiple sites, this would exceed the allowed amount fairly quickly.
How do you get around this? Just not have site based email? Thanks for any response.
I’ve never had any issues like that with just a couple of domains. Maybe you have a baby croc account (only allows 1 domain I think). Just a normal shared hosting account, like bluehost, I’ve never had issues running too many processes until I have a few dozen domains usually.
Thanks for the quick reply Spencer. No, I have the “baby croc” plan that allows unlimited domains. I’ve found in forums, other people with the same issue. I’ve also talked to a half dozen different hostgator reps regarding the issue. They offered no help, other than “your site went down because you had too many processes running, but we don’t know why”.
Other than changing my email settings on my computers and phone to “check mail manually”, I can’t find a solution. It would be nice to be able to have multiple WordPress sites on my account, but unfortunately this single problem prevents me from doing so. Maybe BlueHost works differently. Anyway…thanks again for the reply.
p.s. I like your site. Have you considered adding a “subscribe to comments” plugin so commenters can get notified when a reply to a thread is left? There are free ones out there. Just a suggestion 🙂
Is there a free one that’s close to as good as Disqus comments?
What email programs were you using? By the way, if you built up a mailing list for a website could you use Hostgator services to do this or would you need something like Mailchimp?
When you were hosting 100 websites per month on bluehost how much were you paying bluehost per month? What hosting plan were you on? Thanks
I had I think 3 or 4 different bluehost accounts at the time, each about $6/mth.
Bluehost is good; it gives you lot more storage and bandwidth, so your websites won’t get clogged fast. But the issue of malicious script quickly affecting your other websites does exist.
Regarding multiple accounts on Bluehost, won’t they have the same C class for all the accounts?
No, not necessarily. Bluehost has many different IPs that they use for different hosting accounts. So, you might be on the same IP, but your chances are very good that it will not.