Always Diversify with Different Hosting Companies
May 18, 2008
For the past two hours, half of my websites have been down due to a major collapse in one of my hosting providers. Not only are my sites down, but the whole freaking hosting company appears to be having problems as their homepage won’t even load.
I have two shared hosting accounts – one with Host Gator and the other with HostICan. I have never had issues with either one until today when HostICan fell off the grid. Hopefully the issue will be resolved here shortly, but I obviously won’t be making any money from those sites during this time. This is frustrating, but it also reinforces a decision I made in January to spread my sites across multiple accounts.
There are many things that fall out of your control with affiliate marketing. Google could penalize your websites, you could lose important data without having a backup, and of course…your hosting company could let you down. The last two instances can’t be entirely prevented, but they can be controlled. In the case of hosting, a simple shared account is typically less than $10 a month. This makes it incredibly affordable to protect yourself from losing valuable uptime if something goes wrong. When you start to get cheap with things like this you set yourself up for disaster.
If you try a lot different niches like I do then you know how quickly your portfolio of websites can grow. I will often publish a simple site, do some basic promotion, and then let it sit to see if I get any conversions. Depending on how much effort I put into a project, it might lay dormant for three or four months before I come back to it. In the meantime I am building new sites in other niches. Before I know it, I have ten sites loaded into my hosting account. This would create a big problem if they all went down at the same time.
My current benchmark for websites per account is ten. After that I either sell the duds or let just delete the domain (rare). Once I have ten good ones going it is time to expand to another hosting account. I recommend this strategy to anyone who wants to avoid losing all your sales when technical problems occur. It may only take five minutes for your host to fix the issue, but in the meantime your customers are buying from someone else :0
BTW – I strongly recommend Host Gator (especially after today). I have used both their online chat support and telephone support. Both times they fixed my problems in less than an hour. I think they cost a buck or two more per month than other companies, but I will gladly pay this small premium for their proven customer support.
May 24th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Good advise, I heard shared hosting is not good for seo do you know if that’s true?
May 25th, 2008 at 3:31 am
I wouldn’t worry about shared hosting affecting SEO results if you are using white hat techniques. The people most at risk are those building hundreds of large database-driven sites who leave a footprint for google to find.
It is also not a good idea to link all of your sites together on the same hosting account. You can add a link here or there, but keep them as seperate as possible.