SE Ranking: Multiple Sites on Reseller Plan VS Shared

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Posted by madlynx, 01-27-2013, 09:19 PM
Back in 2004, I wanted to be able to host multiple sites of my own with one account. At the time, the only solution I found was to get a reseller plan. The only problem was and remains the amount of storage space (15GB) which is nowhere near what I need. Now, most shared hosting plans claim to allow unlimited sites. So I signed up with one. The thing is I can only have one main domain at the root. All the other sites have to be installed in a sub-directory like /public_html/whatever.com. 1. Will this have a negative impact with search engines? 2. I am not a reseller. So besides not having WHM and sharing a server with more people, are there any other limitations compared to the reseller account? Thanks.
Posted by Ray H, 01-27-2013, 09:44 PM
Having addon domains under one domain account does not affect SEO or SERP. There is no one way to setup an apache config so the name and location of the virtual hosts could vary from server to server. Google has no way of determining this. Now what could potential harm your seo is your site being hosted on a shared ip. Google sometimes will ban sites for violations by the Ip.
Posted by madlynx, 01-27-2013, 10:07 PM
I just went to the "reseller offers" section and WOW! I'm getting ripped off big time! I am paying $20/month for 15GB when this other company Eleven2 is charging the same for 200GB!!! Plus free dedicated IP address ($1.50/mth w/ my current host), merchant account, domain reseller account (N/A w/ my...) The shared hosting plan I'm trying out is $6/month and support sucks. Is this standard pricing for a reseller account nowadays? Now I'm getting greedy... I assume the right to resell is not free. Since I am not a reseller, could I get everything else w/ even more GBs for the same price? Thanks again.
Posted by madlynx, 01-27-2013, 10:10 PM
Good point. Thanks.
Posted by Kingfish85, 01-27-2013, 10:10 PM
Eh, Eleven2 is a good company from my experience, but typically you'll find when paying high costs for less resources the quality will be better. It's not "always" the case, but if you're happy where you are I wouldn't move. $20/mo isn't very expensive...
Posted by Host4Geeks-Kushal, 01-27-2013, 11:04 PM
Like others stated. Absolutely no. Having multiple sites on either Shared or Reseller plan has no impact on your SER what so ever. Neither does having multiple sites on same IP.
Posted by madlynx, 01-27-2013, 11:15 PM
Thanks for your response. I agree with you. I learned this in tennis: "If you're winning, keep doing whatever you're doing!". The 15 GB limit though just doesn't work for me. In fact, it's even caused some of my sites to stop working. At times, I could not even fix them anymore because there was not even enough space left to erase a file, or delete emails! So I would have to create new packages, one with 10 MB less space for a working site, and another one with 10 MB more space for the problem site! Nightmare! And as far as the service goes: Once I complained because of a free upgrade I didn't get. So the support guy told me that while looking into my problem, he noticed that he had made a mistake in the past and that in fact, I was given too much space as it was. He was wrong. Regardless, he just lowered my quota from 20 GB to 15 GB! I'm on a roll, so here's another one. One day I tried to work on a site and found out that the site had been down for who knows how long. I checked all my other sites and they were all down too. I contacted support. They had shut down all of my sites/domains, without even notifying me, because of one infected email in my brother's mailbox! Not only did they blame me for it, but they made me close his email account and even then, I had to fight to get my sites back up! I could go on and on: corrupted databases, missing pages, etc... and always the same response: tough luck! I don't know if I'm allowed to name anyone or any company here. If I am please let me know. I think people should know about this. So, in other words, I am not exactly happy with my current host!
Posted by Website themes, 01-28-2013, 05:02 AM
There is one way in which having domains hosted in sub-directories can impact your SE ranking. Let me explain: - Say your main domain name (example.com) is in /home/user/public_html/ - You add another domain name - example2.com - and it ends up in /home/user/public_html/example2.com - Now your second domain's contents can be accessed from two different URLs: 1) example2.com 2) example.com/example2.com It's unlikely that you or anyone else will ever link to your domain using the 2nd URL. But if they did and the search engines crawled that content too it could result in a duplicate content penalty. So that is one scenario where having multiple sites in the same shared hosting account could be bad for SEO. Mind you there are ways around that. You could place a .htaccess file in /home/user/public_html/example2.com that redirects to example2.com. Or if you were using a CMS like WordPress it would do that for you automatically.
Posted by Trip, 01-28-2013, 08:49 PM
Even at current pricing, $20 for 15 or 20 GB with a host who's at least worth its weight in salt is pretty standard. I wouldn't look to jump ship to anyone offering 10x the quota for the same or less price. More often than not, the degree of increase in overselling will be in direct correlation to the decrease in quality...be it in support, uptime, performance, etc... I'd stay put until you can identify an industry-wide shift in pricing by at least a majority of the market leaders.