Flexibility If you are planning to have more than one site, costs can stack up. It is also likely that Google will recognize your sites as being related and will ascribe less weight to any links between your related sites in determining the ranking of any one of them.

This is why some hosting providers are beginning to advertise “multiple domain hosting” (i.e., you can have more than one domain in the same package) and “separate C Block IP addresses” (i.e., Google will not so readily recognize the different domains as being related; a C Block is a group of unique numerical addresses allocated to a hosting provider). In my view, the related domains risk is overstated.

Matt Cutts, a blogging engineer at Google (and the unofficial voice of the company), has confirmed that related sites penalties do indeed apply, as a way of tackling spammers who build multiple interlinked sites to manipulate rankings. However, he has also said that you would need to be hosting hundreds of sites together to risk being adversely affected by this.

My advice would be never to host more than 10 sites with the same hosting provider and not to worry too much about different C Blocks. If you do ever suffer a penalty, you may find that more than one of your sites is affected (“tarred with the same brush”), but the cost of using different blocks is generally high and the risk-reduction benefits are relatively low.

The multiple-domain hosting option is very attractive, however. You may decide to host a blog alongside your business site (a great idea that I will cover later, page 167). You may decide to branch out into different business niches (an idea I covered in the business proposition section earlier, page 27). Either way, if you have to pay separately to host these, your costs will quickly mount up, as will the complexity of administering your different sites.

One final technical point on the flexibility of your hosting provider. Ask them a few questions about their support for regular server-side SEO activities. For example, do they allow you to edit your .htaccess file? Do they support both 301 redirects and mod_rewrite URL modification? I will cover both later in more detail, but suffice to say, theseshould be pretty key factors in your decision at this stage.

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