I was in the process of deciding between two webmaster programs - one offered by Pair.com and the other OLM.com .
These seem to be two companies that strike a good balance between quality and price ( unless other suggestions ).
The two are very similiar as far until you get to adding additional accounts where Pair.com charges you a $15 setup fee plus $1 month per domain. The additional charge is for the unique IPs for each.
OLM does not charge for any additional domain setups or monthly fees, as they do not provide separate IPs for each. However, their site states that "the processing of each domain is handled by the Apache webserver directly, making your domains search engine friendly". Upon further inquiry they told me all domains would be hosted out of the subdirectories of the main domain but would be accessible by going to www.domainname.com instead of www.maindomain.com/subdirectortyname. The main difference to true IP hosting would be in this scenario, all the sub-domains/parked domains would be sharing the users and the space of the main IP based domain.
My question is whether or not this would be adequate in a SEO sense? I plan on setting up 30 different domains per plan which would all be operated by myself. I want each domain to have it's own identity in that they will each be considerably different in nature. However, I'm not certain this warrents a separate IP address since the latest discussion has been that virtual hosting is treated equally by the SEs.
Again, after all that rambling, that question comes back to do you believe the OLM setup would be adequate?
Thanks so much for any time and thoughts on this,
Billy
[edited by: heini at 11:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 7, 2003]
[edit reason] rephrased quote / see sticky [/edit]
Such an arrangement is quite common. There's some arguments for having dedicated IPs for a site, also there are arguments for diversifying your sites over several hosts.
Nevertheless, this scenario has worked for me very well. Basically it's a scenario of havng all eggs in one basket. Should this particular server have problems - all sites have problems.
Millions of sites are hosted like this - it does work.
I use Pair and they are excellent. Probably the best out of all my hosts in terms of handling multiple domains.
The converse of having all your eggs in one basket of course is that if you have them in a lot, there always seems to be at least one egg in trouble. It's a case of lots of little problems versus a small number of big ones.
