Web Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

If you are making a comfortable living from the Internet and theWeb or have a plan to achieve that goal, it’s likely that youare running more than ten websites. The websites are yourvirtual offices. You want to your sites to be up and running 365days, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. Managing multiplewebsites is a daunting task if running one website is a hobby.

Proposed Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

The hosting strategy we propose is to host your multiple majorwebsites with 3-4 different hosting companies, and open areseller account with another hosting company for 1) small andnew websites, 2) web development and 3) backup. Hosting with toomany hosting companies will significantly increase the time andthe difficulty of managing sites, and using a single hostingcompany isn’t a smart choice either.

Justification of the Hosting Strategy

Cost – Cost of the Web hosting isn’t an issue for running asingle web site whether it costs $5 or $25 a month. Thedifference is only a few hundred dollars or less a year. It’salways nice and smart to get the most out of every single dollarin doing business. At least, a few hundred dollars differencewouldn’t make or break a business. If you run 10 or even 50websites, the cost of Web hosting alone will define the successor failure of your online adventure. To cut the hosting cost,the option is to use a reseller hosting account to host as manysmall or new sites as you want for about $15 a month. You hostone or 2 major websites with one hosting company. Shared hostingaccount costs under $10 a month, and dedicated server will cost$50 or more a month.

Uptime – If your bread-and-butter maker website is down for afew hours, you’ll lose hundreds of dollars and more. Even thoughmost hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, it’s not common tosee a website down for a few hours. A site could be down for ahalf day or even more if a hosting company is doing a majorupdate. The hosting company may do the update in a weekend or amajor holiday, but that’s when many family-oriented and travelsites generate their revenues. If you could afford the loss ofrevenues, many websites owners can’t bear the psychological lossand pressure. Hosting your sites with a few hosting companieswill reduce the risk of downtime.

Application Development – For simple web application, webmasterswill do development on the same production hosting site. If yourecommerce applications are complex, doing development on theproduction site may bring down the live site especially ifyou’re in the process of changing configuration files or installcustomized applications. The option is setup a website on yourreseller account for development and testing, and move theapplications to production account on another server after thecompletion.

Backup – If you’re not happy with a hosting company, a hostingcompany is out of business, or the servers will be down for aday or two, you can easily temporarily or permanently switchfrom one hosting company to other since you’re familiar with thesite managing tools already. If you have a backup or secondarycopy running on another server, all you need for the switch isthe transfer of the domain, which will take no more than aminute.

Shop Before You Buy

There’re too many hosting plans to choose from a large number ofhosting companies – ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, DedicatedServers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting WithTemplates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, ResellerHosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers,Windows Hosting or Co-location Hosting. Compare the cost,hosting features, tracking records of hosting companies beforemaking your commitment. Good luck with your online adventures.

About the author:Bruce Zhang has over 10 years of experience in web development, databasedesign and managing web servers. He currently manages dozens ofwebsites using ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, DedicatedServers, eCommerce Hosting, Managed Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting for web hosting needs.