With low cost of domain names and low hosting fees it is common to own several websites. There are a many cheap web hosting services and also there are few ways to manage multiple domains. It’s important to know the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
The most basic choice is whether or not to administer your domains with the same host. Most web hosts offer packages which can be set up to allow several sites on one account, or allow inpidual sites to be operated under separate accounts.
You may have an existing website and like the services your host provides. By starting a new website with the same host you get the reassurance of dealing with a company you know. Sometimes you may get a discount for every additional account with the same host.
Using a different host for a new website will let you compare the quality of hosting services offered by different companies.
In addition, separate hosts will provide each of your websites with a different IP address.
Having different IP addresses is useful if you plan to link the sites together for search engine optimization. Incoming links are very important: a website with many incoming links will get a higher position in most search engines. If the links are coming from the same IP address their value will be discounted.
Hosting your websites with different hosting registrars guarantees that they have different IP addresses. An inpidual IP address is available at extra cost from most companies. For a fee each website can have its own unique IP address. Having a unique IP address is required if you want to have a secure connection (https) enabled on your site.
If you decide to host all your websites with the same company, there are three basic ways to go.
Each site could have its own account, you could sign up for a reseller account, or you could get a dedicated server account. Hosting all your websites with one host has a few advantages, but there is one major disadvantage – if your server goes down, all your sites go down. If you depend on your sites for income this can be painful and it’s a good idea to have at least one of your sites with a different host.
Why use multiple domain names?
It’s quite common for a site to be referenced by more than one domain name. In fact, most sites are referenced by at least two: a www version and a non-www version. These are usually set up to reference the index page on a site and produce the same results for a searcher.
It could, however, be argued that these are these same domain names. So the question remains: why would someone want to have more than one unique domain name for a single site? Search engines – First, let’s take a brief look at search engines. In the past, it was a very common spamming technique to purchase dozens, hundreds or in some really gross cases, thousands of domain names, all referencing exactly the same site. These were all submitted to the search engines, and many of them were indexed and blindly added to the results. This is how many questionable sites used to get top search results very quickly and inexpensively.
The search engines have apparently caught onto this technique. At the very least, it has become common knowledge that this kind of spamming is not tolerated (sometimes common knowledge can be just as effective a deterrent as actual enforcement). I know that in the past it was normal to find many sites of different domain names but identical content in search engine results; today it’s far rarer.
In fact, the top search engine, Google, bases its ranking scheme on quality of links. What this translates to is you must get popular (higher ranking) sites to link to your site to raise your ranking. Thus, it’s a better strategy to get as many links to a SINGLE domain name than to many different domain names.
