This topic can be SOoooo confusing! Let’s see if I can make it simple.
The issues are many. Hosting services can really make your Internet experience crappy. When your hosting is messed up, or our autoresponder service is down, or your payment processing account is frozen – life just becomes stressful. If you hold calls or webinars and your Internet connection has trouble, you’ll just want to shoot someone!
So the hosting company you choose is important. And there are so very many companies out there! In fact, I offer hosting. And I can tell you, it does not take very much to set yourself up so you LOOK like a hosting company. But my arrangement is more of a reseller situation. I’m a viable choice because people get to know me, purchase some training or coaching from me, and just want me to handle their hosting. They get familiar, and they want to work with me when they have hosting issues. I have suggestions for companies to use for various types of hosting, and you’ll find those suggestions below.
So what are the issues here?
The ultimate hosting is a DEDICATED machine, with professional webmasters and datacenter support. I don’t know what that costs, actually. If you’ve got between $400 and $2500 monthly to plunk down on hosting, then this would be wonderful! From a business point of view, you do NOT start with a dedicated server. Make sense?
While there are ways to get free hosting, you generally avoid those situations.
So in the middle are two viable options for new online businessess. One will cost $1.00 to $20.00 a month, more or less, and it is Add-On Domain Hosting. Separate CPanel accounts are wonderful, but generally come with both a higher price and more technology to learn. These run $15 to hundreds of dollars a month, and have a WHM (Web Host Manager) login, and from there you generate your own CPanel login accounts.
With this type of hosting, you get one CPanel to work with. So you have one username and password, and the files for LOTS of domains will live in that one space. You get one set of access logs, one error_log file and if there are CPU and other usage constraints, all your domains added together need to stay within the limits.
This option is good for price. As you get to the $10 and $20 range of pricing, you generally get phone support and you get better service. As your work down to the $1.00 monthly price range, you get chat support or Help Desk / email support only.
The issue here is trying to separate domains. What if you do find that one of your domains is ripe for reselling? It has some traffic, some sales – and it has enough SEO and the design is attractive enough that you can sell that domain and website off as a business for… Let’s say $650.
This works REALLY smoothly when that domain has an entire web hosting account – a CPanel login – dedicated to it. If it is mixed into an Add-On Domain hosting account, you may have a never-ending headache as you try to extract that one domain, move it to its own CPanel hosting and make it all work.
Ah, what an option! Every domain gets its own account! This means there is a separate username and password for every domain. If you have outsourcers working on your site, they only get access on a site-by-site basis. So things are more secure, and your risk of various issues is reduced.
If you want to sell off a business comprising of a domain name, its web site and all, this is wonderful. You just move this one CPanel account into a fresh hosting account, and transfer the hosting account and the domain name to the new owner. Simple.
What isn’t so perfectly wonderful is that you’ve just added some complexity. You get one account from your web hosting company for this privilege of having separate CPanel acocunts. And that one account gives you access to WHM – Web Hosting Manager. You do get one CPanel account as well for your main domain.
But the rub is, you need to learn both CPanel *and* WHM. Doh!