Question to those with multiple adsense sites

[thinkbig]

I have a few sites that i run adsense on and in 06 my goal will be to expand and start more sites with a focus on advertising and quality content.

Right now i have general hosting through a provider and im wondering if I would like to setup say 4 sites a month what type of hosting would you suggest.

Should i do a virtual server where each site will reside and each will have its own database/resources etc..

Should i buy a server or colo, any other options?

What do you guys that have or plan to have multi sites suggest that is best for the budget and the growth of the site network.

[Hobbs]

from my experience your hosting type has no bearing on your AdSense revenue or even Google rank, your content topic, quality and traffic does, plan based on that, start smaller and less expensive, and grow gradually when the income starts to justify it, but keep your sites spread over as many providers as you can.

[webdreamer]

I use a hosting company that is $50 a year per domain. I find it to be very reasonable, and affordable.

You have to establish what your needs are, and how much you are willing to pay for each domain.

You can have multiple websites on one domain: www.shopping.com/shoes - www.shopping.com/clothes - www.shopping.com/hats

One domain can look like 3 seperate websites. I have done this when I didn't have the $$$ for all the websites I wanted to publish. Also, it is a great way to test which websites draw traffic, and which ones don't.

[ogletree]

I pay $20 a month and $1 per domain after that per month. My IP's are all very different.

[miguelito]

I pay $ 200 a month but the service is great...depends on your sites and traffic i guess, i have over 2000 online on the server at certain times of day but for sure there are others much bigger.

It's a dedicated server...i wouldn't risk sharing as someone always manages to suck the bandwidth or overload the server....saves a lot of grief and hassle.

[OptiRex]

if I would like to setup say 4 sites a month

How on earth are you going to generate enough relevant, unique, quality, dare I say niche, content to produce a new site every week?

I assume this is all you do, or have you a huge team working with/for you, since it certainly would not be a part-time effort?

[Nikke]

When getting new sites, I decide about the hosting depending on the type of site, and where I think it can go. I also like to spread out my sites on at least three different hosting companies since I'm a little paranoid and like to do some cross linking in carefully selected places.

1-5 pages type of sites, I host virtually on under of my existing domains. These are often experiments. If they fly, I move them to a new account of their own.

All sites that need a cms and maybe a forum goes on seperate accounts on any php mysql enabled hosting service that also offers a ssh connection.

As for dedicated servers... A client of mine had a server breakdown, and that put all of their 5 sites offline until the problem was resolved. That's another reason for having your sites on as many different servers as possible.

[miguelito]

everyone is entitled to their opinion but i don't see how your friend's experience is a reason to use multiple servers with multiple admin panels, multiple log in passwords etc;

i have had a dedicated server for 3 years and my total downtime is 17 hours ( yes i do count it obsessively) ;)

it depends on how good the host is, not how many you use.

[caran1]

I had multiple website with different companies - but they were mostly unreliable. Now I have shifted most websites to a VPS of a more reliable company, traffic and revenue have nearly doubled. It all depends on how good your host is.

[RonS]

You need to have a bulk reseller account, like I do.

$19.95 per month and I can create as many CPanel accounts as I want that will fit into 10GB hard disk space and 100GB bandwidth per month.

Each site can have up to 5 multi-hosted virtual sites under, but I find no reason to do that myself. It is a feature if I wanted to resell some of my space to others... in other words, each site I create is a full-blown, full featured CPanel site.

Actual example: I currently have 7 sites of my own, and 2 resold sites. One of the resold sites has 2 domains hosted.

(The resold sites I have are "given" away, as partial payment for forum moderation duties! How cool is that?)

Good question, and good luck!

[gendude]

I'm addressing your mentioning starting 4 new sites a month - my advice (not that it's worth anything) is to only do one a month while continually adding lots of content to your current sites.

If you add four sites a month - you're liable to have very little content for each additional site for several months, which hurts you with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, as far as people being able to find you, your PR, etc.

It also hurts you because people won't be impressed and probably won't bookmark you, and probably won't recommend you to others.

I think you would be better off with 12 new sites next year with lots of content per site, rather than 48 new sites with little content.

[incrediBILL]

If you have a bunch of little sites that generate $10-$20/day I'd scatter them around on different hosts, different backbones, different STATES so that one hurricane, flood, ice storm or earthquake doesn't put you out of business.

However, if you have one big site like WebmasterWorld then you need one really solid dedicated server colo that is neutrally located as far as natural disasters are concerned and set up a backup server elsewhere with a carbon copy of the site synched daily.

Your DNS should be on a 3rd party, perhaps Network Solutions so that when either server goes belly up you can reroute and be up and running in hours. If you're really clever, you can use rotating DNS and have both servers always active and when one goes belly up you disable that DNS only and the only impact would be the visitors within the last 12 hours to the disabled server would still have that IP address cached and it would be invisible to the rest of the world.

There are other schemes too and your mileage may vary.

[elfred]

My suggestion is to plan for the future. Do not look at current needs. Try to figure out how much (time and money) it would cost you to migrate to a new system if your website is successfull or your current server/service is unreliable. I don't think that 20/50$ per month would do a big difference here, and we usually do not want to put our efforts on unsuccessfull websites :-) You need not to spend your time worried about reliability. Personally, I have a network of servers (with full root access I manage myself) located at different datacenters. Oddly enough, the most reliable servers are the ones that cost more than the others :-)

[petra]

2 websites, one sever, $180/month but two separate IPs

[Nikke]

i have had a dedicated server for 3 years and my total downtime is 17 hours ( yes i do count it obsessively) ;)

So do I, and when this server died on us it was the only down time they had since May 2000.

it depends on how good the host is, not how many you use.

I couldn't agree more. But ther is also the suspicion that an IBL from a site hosted on the very same server doesn't count the same...

[steve40]

12 websites

3 dedicated servers 1 domain on each

and the others split on 9 different hosting virtual servers

steve

[thinkbig]

Thanks for all the great ideas, i have a lot to think about over the holidays.

[Nitrous]

3K per month - free servers!
Freeserve and Wanadoo

I am stingy!