Recommended Hosts
Most of my good sites are hosted by Dreamhost or Pair. Both have provided me
with reliable hosting and responsive customer service. Dreamhost allows you to
host unlimited domains on a single account for $7.95 a month. Pair costs a bit
more for their developer account, but it allows you to host sites on different IP
addresses, and I have NEVER had any issues with Pair.
Dedicated versus Shared Hosting
I have found shared hosting to work well for me, although some people
recommend using dedicated hosting (which is typically far more expensive).
Shared hosting places many domain names on the same IP address and same
server, whereas dedicated servers allow you to place just your stuff on a server.
Search engines such as Google usually place spam penalties on domain names, not
IP addresses. Although it does happen, rarely does a hosting network get
penalized. I believe the SearchKing network is one example where a whole hosting
network got penalized, but this is extremely rare.
If you are going to be making major investments into the web, then it may be
worth it to buy a reliable dedicated server. Off the start, I could not afford one so I
used shared hosting. As my business model progressed, and my traffic increased, I
later bought a dedicated host for SEOBook.com. Most of my other sites are still
hosted on shared hosting accounts.
Free Hosting
I do not recommend free hosting. With the plague of garbage on the web many
people may not be willing to link to sites that reside on a free host. Free hosts
usually use your content to build link popularity or put some ugly banners on your
site, which ruin the page flow and make it look exceptionally unprofessional.
A commercially-oriented website needs to show significantly greater quality for me
to want to link to it if it resides on a free host.
I have seen some blogs that were hosted at Blogspot (Blogger’s free host) do all
right, but that exception is based on the fact that blogs are generally more personal
in nature and not so commercially driven. Even those blogs would probably be
better off if they used a more feature-rich blogging engine. Plus, if they ever want
to move their site, it is hard to consolidate the link popularity they built up if all
those links point at a Blogspot location.
If you create a subdomain from a free site and eventually want to move your site, it
may be hard to move some of that link popularity, and aged domain trust you
developed, to the new location.
Cheap Hosting
There are many risks with bad, cheap hosting, but decent, cheap hosting of
secondary type sites can help diversify your business model and lessen the risk if
your main site goes down. One cheap host I have used is 3.75 hosting.
Once I renewed my credit card and forgot to give them my changed credit card
details and my sites immediately went down without warning. That is just one
example of the type of things you can expect from cheap hosting providers.
If you are unsure how reliable your host is, you may want to use a tracking service
such as Internet Seer.
Host in Your Country
Many major search engines give sites a relevancy boost if they are hosted in the
same location as the local search market. In some locations, local hosting may not
be economical, but if you are promoting a site primarily geared toward the U.K.,
you would want to host that site in the U.K.
Resources
$3.75 hosting (http://www.3.75-hosting.com)
Dreamhost hosting (http://www.dreamhost.com)
Firefox live http headers extension
(http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/)
GoDaddy domain registrar (http://www.godaddy.com)
Google Image Labeler (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/)
ICANN domain registration information (http://www.icann.org/)
Internet Hosting Report (http://www.internet-hosting-report.com/)
Internet Seer: host tracking (http://www.internetseer.com/)
Moniker domain registrar (http://www.moniker.com)
Pair (http://www.pair.com)
Porter Stemming Algorithm
(http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/)
Server Header Checker
(http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp)
Web Bug (http://www.cyberspyder.com/webbug.html)
WordNet: a lexical database (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/)
Some Notes
