Increasing number of websites and hosting

how do you keep costs down

[vivalasvegas]

I have 4 websites, each hosted on its own separate hosting plan. I'm preparing to launch a few more in the months to come and having separate hosting accounts for each website is starting to look a bit expensive, especially that the number of websites is likely to keep growing. How do you cope with this? Is having multiple websites hosted on the same account a good option? Some hosts offer this, but usually they don't provide email, stats for addon domain names. I'm mostly concerned with how search engines would view this, whether SE bots can tell that multiple domains are hosted on the same account.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[physics]

If you're cross-linking those sites to each other you may be better off keeping them on seperate hosting accounts. If you're not then you'll save money having one account and it'll also be easier to manage (and you can get seperate IPs and stats for each domain with a good host). You should get a unique IP for each site in my opinion.
Disadvantage to having all of your sites with one company is that then you have all your eggs in one basket and if that one company goes under or something you might be stuck with no working sites. Maybe consolidate into two hosting accounts with 5 sites on each or make sure to go with one of the top providers, even if it costs more.

[stu2]

I have a related question. If I do host more than 1 website in 1 hosting account, would it be better to forward the domains to a subdomain or a folder. ie: domain2.domain1.com or domain1.com/domain2/. Which would be better or search engines? Anything else to consider?

[moose606]

I have a dozen websites, and decided a year ago to go to a dedicated server, for economics, and to improve pageloads. I have been happy on both counts. The sites all load much quicker, and it costs me $18 per month per site, which is less than I was paying my old hosting company. I also have much more control over my sites.

[lgn1]

One thing you can do to save money, is to have a common payment gateway.

We direct payment information from all our websites to one location to process payment information. This way, we only pay for one security certificate every year instead of several.

[Marketing Guy]

A lot of hosts offer reseller accounts where you get discounts based on how many plans you buy (or some offer broad based unlimited domain / bandwidth and allow you to setup user CP's etc).

Obviously you get what you pay for still, but there are affordable options out there.

I tend to scale my outlay with how much I want the site to stay online. Really not that bothered if random sites drop now and again. ;)