Hosting Your Clients' Sites

So I'm now in the process of setting up a web design/SEO service targeting local clients.

Do I need to worry about hosting them using a single host? I have an unlimited plan on hostgator and I was wondering if it's bad if I had like, say, 20 sites hosted on that plan.

I asked because a lot of people are talking about hosting on different class C IPs when putting up a blog network. Of course, I'm not going to network them together. So will it matter?

Although, I'm planning on putting up a footer link on all sites linking back to my company's site.

Its better you switch to Dedicated or VPS for that. Shared hosting is not recommended for multiple sites.

Can you get away with charging them enough for separate basic hosting plans for each company? Hosting is like $10/month on a good host. Are any of the sites going to be getting 50,000+ hits per month or using high intensive cron jobs or scripts? I dont know how the unlimited plan works, but as long as hostgator wont get mad and you can keep them all organized, I dont see a problem.

Well, I don't want to invest in a dedi or VPS considering the fact that I'm not really sure if I'll get a lot of clients. Besides, I'd like to focus on SEO.

Why would hostgator get mad? They're the one offering the unlimited hosting.

Unlimited is not really unlimited... Its all about how much resources you use.

Just make sure you have WHM so every domain has it's own cpanel. This is useful when you want to move to another host.

So you're suggesting that I use the unlimited hosting for my own sites, and different plans for my clients?

BigMarcusStud said:

So you're suggesting that I use the unlimited hosting for my own sites, and different plans for my clients?

Click to expand...

Yes basically. As the one guy said, unlimited plans are never unlimited. It really depends what type of sites they are hosting. Are they low traffic and use very little resources? You can get hosting for like 5-10 per month and then you can keep each one separate should make things much easier. Just tell your clients to pay the $5-$10.00.

I host some of my sites (~50 or so) on a shared hostgator plan. I got pretty lucky in getting on a server that so far has been pretty fast and I haven't had any issues. However, the unlimited plans have an inode cap of 250,000. I am just under that limit and have started thinking about where I'm going to move some of the sites. I was surprised how fast I burned through inodes. If you use a lot of caching it eats them up with all the little files. All your email uses inodes as well, I've started going through and cutting down on the Twitter notification emails as these fill up all my mailboxes fast and burn up inodes.

Once you exceed 100,000 inodes they stop doing automated backups.

Another thing to think about is what kind of clients are you going to be hosting sites for. What type of SLA do you need to provide your clients. If they are just static online brochure type sites then maybe they won't care if something happens and it goes down for a day. If they are transactional sites then maybe you need some redundancy, get a couple of VPS's and self host nameservers and have one maintain the live sites and one stores a hot backup so you can swap the nameservers and failover to it.

Hostgator is unlimited as long as you dont use up 35% of their resources (35 was just a random guess though.)

As long as you aren't receiving massive amounts of traffic, you should be okay. I use shared hosting for my clients and they barely even make a dent in the hosting plan.

But Big G won't get mad if they're all on shared hosting and I'm going to place a link to my company's website on all my clients' websites?

make your clients to pay for their own hosting separate account.
also try to make them pay for it and get commission on your sale.

i am doing the same way since 4 years and no problemo at all.
it's also better if your client wants to stop using your service so just hand over username and password.

Get your people to pay a monthly hosting/maintenance fee, as you get more clients, you will be able to switch to a VPS...NO NEED FOR A DEDI. Even at this, local websites will get no more than a max of 100 views monthly, that means you wont be using a lot of resources and it should be fine starting out.

Or go to a better host or stay with hostgator and get a reseller hosting account which details exactly how much resource you can use.
I like eleven2 but hostgator is pretty good as well.