Buy Server or Pay for Hosting

[TravG]

Curious what everyone thinks is better, buying a server and hosting your websites yourself or just pay for hosting.

I have quite a few websites, 20+ so my hosting bill is substantial each month. Unfortunately I do not know much about servers and what it takes to host your own websites, but I am sure I could learn it if that is the right way to go.

For anyone who does host their own websites now (or knows about servers), I have a few questions.....

First, while I know it is not that important to SEO anymore, but can you get multiple IP addresses so that your websites are not all hosted under the same IP?

With security becoming a must these days, can you buy multiple SSL certificates? For the majority of my websites I do like have an SSL attached to it.

My thinking in the past has always been the extra money is worth paying for hosting so all of the websites do not look like they are associated to each other.

From an SEO standpoint, would you rather have your websites hosted by a third party or have them hosted on your own server?

Thanks for nay help and insight!

Travis

[universal4]

Depending on how much you know about how either IIS or Apache work might depend on the type of plan you would pick.

In most cases you could get either a dedicated or virtual server and put all the sites on one, depending on their sizes and traffic each of them do.

Most often whatever plan you would go with would have webmin or something similar or possibly virtualmin to help manage the server, or it might all be managed with cpanel or similar.

As for the SSL certificates, it is not necessary to use purchased certificates as they are plenty of free choices that renewals can be easily automated on either linux or windows servers.

As for the seo benefits the pro's and con's will continue to be debated for many years, but since IP's have all been allocated for a long time, IMO seo and ranking have more to do with many other factors that ip is not important. Besides, Google has plenty of ways to know and understand connections between sites whether hosted on different servers or not.

At any time if you need help or want to discuss this happy to arrange a chat at your convenience.

Rick
Universal4

[ddm]

a decent linux reseller acc [shared ip] cost like 30$ a month, w/ like unlim bandwidth, storage, emails.
[I use brixly uk, and hostwinds for US]

as for ssl certificates, most cpanels do it in 1 click with letsencrypt, or some other free certs as Rick/Universal mentioned ^ (my brixly acc uses letsencrypt) . Hostwinds uses a certificate issued by AVG.

shop around, try something out. you can always cancel / move your stuff elsewhere if things don't work out. most hosts will even happily migrate your sites from server A to server B for you.

edit: avoid anything to do with godaddy, or companies they bought IMO. they bought my last host and turned it to a shitshow, so i had to move 30+ sites to a new host. sigh.

[universal4]

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the seo part of the mix in 2010

https://www.woorank.com/en/edu/seo-g...ess-seo-impact

Rick
Universal4

[casinobonusguy]

We have had our own servers since we started ,just gives you more control more c class ips etc.It cost us about $600 a month per server but when you look at % it is not much.I would never share my server though,it just takes some outdated site to get hacked and makes you vulnerable .

[Christiaan]

Speed is also a big factor for SEO. If you have your own server/cloud/vps in a good datacenter you usually get higher speeds than if you use a shared hosting.
Sometimes you might also need extra (php/framework) modules on your server. With a shared hosting this is not always possible.

But of course you will need some knowledge, although with a control panel like cpanel, directadmin or plesk it is very user friendly.
There are also companies that offer good managed servers with a good SLA. The price can be high in this case.

[casinobonusguy]

iWeb.ca is one we use ,please note they charge same in cad as usd so if you sign up definitely pay your bills in cad .

[Michael Martinez]

First, while I know it is not that important to SEO anymore, but can you get multiple IP addresses so that your websites are not all hosted under the same IP?

You can but hosting companies are very stingy with extra IPv4 addresses because there are no more new ones. They must buy previously allocated blocks of IP addresses on the resale market.

With security becoming a must these days, can you buy multiple SSL certificates? For the majority of my websites I do like have an SSL attached to it.

If you have your own server you should be able to set up AutoSSL with any of the free or low-priced certificate providers. Cpanel has fallen out of favor because they changed their pricing structure but if you go with a Cpanel server you'll get Comodo SSL certificates as part of the license. You would not need to pay extra for 20-30 sites.

My thinking in the past has always been the extra money is worth paying for hosting so all of the websites do not look like they are associated to each other.

The search engines don't care and never did care about the IP addresses. If you really want to differentiate your sites on the basis of "location" they should be located in different data centers. That is because you could put 100 IP addrseses on the same server and all the traceroute reports would lead to the same place.

Search engines have never been fooled by this strategy.

And because most Websites are hosted on shared IP addresses anyway it was never an option for Google. People took two research papers for the Hilltop algorithm (used in Google News) and LocalRank and misinterpreted them as being used in General Web Search. That was never the case.

Teoma/Ask was the only major search engine that ever cared about IP addresses, and that went away when they started rebranding Google search results years ago.

From an SEO standpoint, would you rather have your websites hosted by a third party or have them hosted on your own server?

You have much more control over performance with your own server but either you pay extra for someone to manage it or you learn how to manage it yourself.

One of the downsides of running your own server is having to deal with spam email and botnets, which can place a heavy burden on server performance.

If you get a server, be sure you get one with plenty of RAM and that uses an SSD. Some hosting companies are still selling/leasing HDD storage which is cheaper and slower than SSD storage.

[Cash Bonus]

I always pay for my web hosting and I've never had a need to buy my own server. There are a number of affordable web hosting packages from different companies. I use Liquid Web. They charge at a reasonable price and they have excellent and professional customer support. I've never had any issues with these guys. They also have live chat and are responsive and stay in touch with you through their ticketing system, and you can request a transcript of your communication with them to be emailed to you

[allfreechips]

I have a dedicated server, i really don't own it but its what it is and I a lot of sites on shared servers.. depends what you are looking for. If you use WP you need a serious WP based host to try to manage the memory sucking stupid query using WP engine...

[WagerX]

I understand your concern. I used to have 12-20 different hosting services spread out everywhere to vary the IP addresses. I wanted to get the links pointing to the money sites to be as unique as possible. I don't know if google has completely discounted that yet. I think it could have value if you used a different registry, registry information (identifying data) on each domain, different datacenters and hosting companies. It was worth it at one point for me. I suspect that google is able to detect these networks better now. I don't think it's worth the effort anymore , at least in comaration with making good content.