I recently had a customer ask me for some advice on aquiring hosting for his new network of feeder sites. For those of you who are not familiar with feeder sites, they are a number of smaller sites, blogs or online resource that allows you to feed traffic and backlinks to your main website. Squidoo and HubPages are examples of free resources you can use as feeders to create links and organic traffic to your money site. While free resources are great, finding niche long tail domains and setting up your own network of feeder sites can improve your SEO rankings as well as generating properties with potential for higher amounts of organic traffic.
Today’s post is going to revolve around the hosting issue but I do intend to dedicate some articles to creating your own network of feeder sites in the future.
Now let’s get back to the hosting question. There are several options for hosting your feeder sites and the one most commonly used by companies and individuals is virtual shared hosting. A web host basically creates a box where multiple people can use the resources of the same server for a very low price. While the cost is low, you run many risks of actually damaging your efforts in creating feeder sites. For instance, if you end up sharing the same IP with a spammer or warez trader, your feeder site may be penalized for their sins, making the links irrelevant and causing the site to lose any traction it had in SERPs. Additionally if the host oversells the box, your site could become so slow that you lose any chance you had of getting organic traffic to your main money site.
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Dedicated servers are another option but they tend to be an expensive option and have some limitations. For instance, unless you select a managed hosting solution or have staff with the expertise, you’ll be stuck troubleshooting and maintaining your own physical server. Alternately the availability of unique IP address ranges assigned to the box may be limited.
My recommendation on hosting for feeder sites is VPS hosting. I’ve talked about this in the past here at the blog but basically this type of hosting is a shared hosting account that gives you have guaranteed processing power and RAM. This means you won’t be competing for those resources with others housed on the same physical server. You also have your own set of dedicated IPs to play with as you add sites to your network. Lastly, the cost is affordable and you could get a few VPS accounts at different hosts to vary the IP ranges for the same cost as a decent dedicated server.
If you’re looking for the best way to increase your search engine results by creating your own network of feeder sites, take a good look at VPS hosting before other hosting options as you’ll get the best value for your money as well as a varied IP range once you fill your first account.